Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/492

474 course, partly due to the concentration of population in cities along the river; for divorce is always more frequent in urban than in rural communities. The same consideration may also be important along the Mediterranean coast, for a large part of the population is here aggregated in cities, for peculiar reasons which will appear in due time. Even more strikingly the great basin of the Seine, center of Teutonic racial characteristics, stands sharply marked off from the whole south. This is most important of all.

Do the facts instanced above have any ethnic significance? Do they mean that the Alpine type, as a race, holds more tenaciously than does the Teuton to its family traditions, resenting thereby the interference of the state in its domestic institutions? A foremost statistical authority, Jacques Bertillon, has devoted considerable space to proving that some relation between the two exists. Confronted by the preceding facts, his explanation is this: that the people of the southern departments, inconstant perhaps, and fickle, nevertheless are quickly pacified after a passionate outbreak of any kind. Husband and wife may quarrel, but the estrangement is dissipated before recourse to the law can take place. On the other hand, the Norman or the Champenois peasant, Teutonic by race, cold and reserved, nurses his grievances for a long time; they abide with him, smoldering but persistent. "Words and even blows terminate quarrels quickly in the south; in the north they are settled by the judge." From similar comparisons in other European countries, M. Bertillon draws the final conclusion that the Teutonic race betrays a singular preference for this remedy for domestic ills. It becomes for him an ethnic trait.

Another social phenomenon has been laid at the door of the Teutonic race of northern Europe; one which even more than divorce is directly the concomitant of modern intellectual and economic progress. We refer to suicide. Morselli devotes a chapter of his interesting treatise upon this subject to proving that "the purer the German race—that is to say, the stronger the Germanism (e. g., Teutonism) of a country—the more it reveals in its psychical character an extraordinary propensity to self-destruction." On the other hand, the Slavic peoples seem to him to be relatively immune. These conclusions he draws from detailed comparison of the distribution of suicide in the various countries of western Europe, and it must be confessed that he has collected data for a very plausible case.