Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/200

190 of woman from self-destruction in the past has depended greatly upon the relatively less harassing part she has taken in the struggle for life. To-day it is different. Now woman occupies the fields of art, literature, finance, and even politics, and, as she goes deeper into these vocations, she must expect to suffer the consequences. Already it is noticeable that feminine suicide is not now entirely due to the sentimental causes of disappointed love, desertion, and jealousy, but to those trials of a more material order such as have led men to the act of self-destruction.

Imitation far exceeds any other of what are called "trivial causes" of suicide, and asserts itself more in woman than in man. It is much more common than is supposed. When self-destruction becomes epidemic, as it sometimes does, its prevalence very largely depends upon imitation. It is said that many years ago the wail of Thomas Hood over The One More Unfortunate brought many a sentimental person to a watery grave in the Thames. And in our own day the vivid representation of suicide upon the stage under conditions appealing forcibly to the imagination has been known to be followed by the self-imposed death of persons whose conditions resembled closely those of the suicide in the drama.

The daily papers are largely responsible for this class of suicides. It can scarcely be doubted that the general diffusion of newspaper reports familiarizes too much the minds of the people with suicide and crime. A single paragraph, a chance expression, a cause given which resembles that of the circumstances surrounding the reader, seizes the imagination, and in a morbid excitement the desire to repeat the act is born. Newspaper reports further promote suicide by inflaming the passion for the notoriety which will be conferred upon the perpetrator through their accounts of the act.

Has city life any influence over the proportion of suicides? This question must be answered in the affirmative. Where the population is dense and the laws of health are neglected, where dirt is common and vice flourishes, where the poor are concentrated, and where fortunes are made and lost in a day, will always be found the highest rate of suicide. It is in the poorer districts of our large cities that suicide is most frequent. In these districts the deprivations of light and air, the poverty, the diseased conditions about them, render the poor moody, morbid, and despondent, and raise in their minds a feeling that life is not desirable.

What can society do to prevent suicide among the poor? The obvious method would be to render their conditions more enjoyable by giving them ampler provisions for pleasure and