Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/201

Rh, making their surroundings more cleanly and agreeable, and by faithfully executing thorough, and most effective sanitation. Proper sanitary and hygienic measures have a wonderful effect in renewing the vitality of our people. They are powerful agents for improving morality.

There probably never will be a time when suicide will be unknown in the world, but there are many preventives that are of value to-day. Religion has in the past been a powerful preventive. But this fear dies out as religion becomes broader. The fear of future punishment on account of self-imposed death is not now the preventive of suicide that it was fifty or a hundred years ago. The moral influences of family life naturally have a tendency to decrease suicide. Thus it has been found that in a million of husbands without children there were four hundred and seventy suicides, and in the same number with children there were but two hundred and five. Of a million wives without children one hundred and fifty-seven committed suicide, as against forty-five with children; widowers without children, one thousand and four; with children, five hundred and twenty-six; widows without children, two hundred and thirty-eight; with children, but one hundred and four. These figures are eloquent pleaders in favor of family ties as conservators of life. They prove distinctly that man must love in order to live.

Laws prescribing punishment for suicide are solecisms. If we wish to prevent suicide we must change conditions for the better, not for the worse. Suicide is beyond the reach of the criminal code. Its prophylactic must be founded, not upon a statute, but upon a wise and judicious management, medical, moral, and philanthropical, of those unfortunate enough to attempt their lives. It would be far better and more humane to sweep away all legislation upon the subject so far as it relates to the individual, and even take for granted that every person is insane who attempts suicide, than to punish their attempts by imprisonment. If the victim is insane, efforts should be made to restore reason; and if failure is met with, a sanitarium should be provided. Those who are sane should be reasoned with, calmed, and assisted.

Our hearts should be filled with tender compassion for those whose lives have been such as to become valueless to them. We should pity them. In the gentlest language possible we should condone and not condemn their act; for it is only with a spirit of sympathy and not of vindictiveness that we can hope to study with profit the causes and preventives of suicide.