Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/199

Rh them is often a welcome friend, a happy relief from walking the streets hungry.

How many suicides are directly attributable to disease can not be stated with exactness, but it may be said, nevertheless, that at the present time, with our advanced skill in surgery and medicine, suicide from disease is undoubtedly on the decrease. Of all suicides there are none to be pitied more than those who kill themselves to escape the racking pain of an incurable illness. For the victim of this sort there is no hope. Another class of suicides, which closely resemble those caused by disease, includes those due to infirmity. Often persons smitten with blindness, or who have met with some terrible accident, in a fit of discouragement kill themselves. Those blind or deformed from birth, however, seldom resort to suicide. Not knowing the pleasure of sight or limb, they go through life contented.

The theory that we hold more strongly to life as we approach its natural conclusion is contradicted by statistics, which everywhere show that the last half of life exhibits a great increase in the rate of suicide. And here it may be pointed out that as to the age of greatest frequency, suicide and crime are diametrically opposed. While suicide attains its highest rate after the prime of life is past, crime, on the contrary, reaches its highest point between the ages of twenty and thirty years. We remark, further, the alarming increase in late years of what is called child-suicide. It is here that education strongly asserts itself as a true and exciting factor, for it has been shown that in those countries where what we are pleased to call education is rigorously forced upon children, there child-suicide is most frequent. And for this system of forced education there is no excuse. It is terrible in its consequences. To increase the strain to just below the collapsing point is not to educate. It only serves to fill the world with nervous, neurotic, morbid beings.

Another cause of the increase of child-suicide is the fear of physical punishment. Instances of children destroying themselves because of punishment or the fear of threatened punishment are constantly recorded in the public prints. Repeated cruel punishments will often extinguish, even in the healthy child, the love of life so characteristic of youth. What, then, are we to expect of poor, devitalized children subjected to the cruelties of barbaric parents?

At the present day man is much more prone to suicide than woman. This is true of man in regard to epilepsy, crime, and other marked signs of degeneration. But it has been observed that as woman approaches man in her mode of life she also becomes more familiar with those abnormal conditions which have previously been peculiar to man. The comparative