Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/104

94 much more steady and remunerative in comparison to any found here; trades-people, skilled workmen, and mechanics, often commit suicide, who find it difficult to obtain employment, and finally hunger and disappointment drive them to this step.

The prevalence of strikes, and trades-unions, with their dangerous restrictions and foolish oaths of allegiance, are fruitful causes of suicide. Men are afraid to work in opposition to the threats of their fellow trades-unionists, and, as poverty stares them in the face and they become desperate, they commit suicide.

A necessary attendant upon increase in population is immorality, engendered by vice attendant upon civilization. The more depraved forms of theatrical amusement found at the low theatre halls, two or three of which now exist in New York, wipe out all of the original purity from the nature of the weak-minded spectators. The low songs at some of these places, abounding in double entendres and suggestive gestures, inflame the dormant instincts of lust in the minds of the deeply-interested audience.

Prostitution is a very easy way leading to suicide. The attendant vices of this class very soon destroy the mind. Opium-eating, inebriety, and snuff-chewing, are habits which nearly all prostitutes follow after a time. The classification of these causes of suicide and their victims is very incomplete, and prostitution is placed on the records in only one instance in 1871, 1872, and 1873, as the calling of the individual.

The prevalence of seduction in large cities is perhaps greater among the lower classes—the workers in factories and shops. Indeed, the chance for this crime among the many thousand young girls and men who are herded together indiscriminately in the large tobacco, hoop-skirt, paper-box, and other factories of great cities, is often made use of. Suicide follows ruin, though not in as many cases as it would in France. I do not doubt but that the large rivers, upon which most American cities are built, give up a great many bodies of unfortunates who end their moral ruin by suicide. In fact, the number of cases reported as "found drowned" may be assumed in general to be suicidal.

In our own cities, as I have before shown, clerks seem to be the class that most often take their own lives. This seems reasonable when we consider the peculiar careers of a great many of them—the temptations of vice, the struggles for situation and support, and the pitfalls of a large city.

How shall we prevent the increase of this crime which advances at the rate of 300 per cent, in seven years? What sanitary measures can be taken to defeat its moral and physical causes?

It is a stupendous undertaking. To reduce its statistics would require an attack upon our whole social system.

I have pointed out the rapidity of our way of living, the excessive