Chapter 17

Clergymen, however, who also constitute an educated professional class, have a suicide rate which is only half that of the population as a whole, and this is undoubtedly due to the restraining influence of religion, which is much stronger in clergymen than in laymen. The relation of suicide to religion raises a number of curious and interesting questions, but, unfortunately, the religious factor is so involved with other factors in the complicated problem of self-destruction that it is almost impossible to isolate it so as to study it alone. For example, the suicide rate of Protestant Christians in the northern part of Ireland is twice that of Roman Catholics in the southern part; but here education comes in as a complication: the Protestants are generally better educated than the Catholics, and their higher suicide rate may be due to their education and not to the form of their religion. In Europe generally, the tendency to suicide is much greater among both Protestants and Catholics than among Jews; but here education, race, and economic condition all come in as complicating factors, so that it is impossible to credit the Jewish faith alone with the lower rate. In view, however, of the fact that the suicide rate of the Protestant cantons in Switzerland is nearly four times that of the Catholic cantons, it seems probable that Catholicism, as a form of religious belief, does restrain the suicidal impulse. The efficient cause may be the Catholic practice of confessing to priests, which probably gives much encouragement and consolation to unhappy but devout believers, and thus induces many of them to struggle on in spite of misfortune and depression.

The Salvation Army, in attempting to lessen self-destruction by opening "anti-suicide bureaus" in large cities, and by inviting persons who are contemplating suicide to visit these bureaus and talk over their troubles, is virtually introducing a system of confession which, so far as this particular evil is concerned, resembles that of the Catholic Church.

In view, however, of the conflicting nature of the evidence, and the extreme difficulty of disentangling religious factors from other important factors, I doubt the possibility of drawing any trustworthy conclusions with regard to the dependence of suicide upon religious belief. It may be said, as a matter of record, that the tendency to self-destruction is greatest among Protestant Christians, next largest among Roman Catholics and Orthodox Greeks, and lowest among Mohammedans and Jews; but the differences are not certainly due to religion.

The dependence of suicide upon nationality and race presents a number of problems of great interest, but of extraordinary difficulty and complexity. I can state a few of these problems, but I cannot solve any of them.

Among the highest suicide rates in Europe are those of Saxony and Denmark, and among the lowest those of Italy, Portugal, and Spain. You may perhaps conclude, from this, that the tendency to self-destruction is much greater among the Slavs and Scandinavians of the north than it is among the Latin peoples of the south, and that the differences are due to latitude or race; but your specious generalization is shattered when you discover that the suicide rates of Norway and Russia, both northern countries inhabited by Scandinavians and Slavs, are almost as low as those of Italy, Portugal, and Spain, all southern countries inhabited by Latins.

From an ethnological point of view, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway are nearly homogeneous Scandinavian states, and we should therefore expect their suicide rates to be nearly if not quite identical; but the rate of Denmark is twice that of Sweden and three times that of Norway.

The Slavs of Bohemia do not differ ethnologically from the Slavs of Dalmatia, but the suicide rate of the one group is 158 per million, while that of the other is only 14 per million. Saxony is not far away, geographically, from Belgium; but the suicide rate of the former is 324 per million, while that of the latter is only 128 per million.

I am unable to offer even a conjectural solution of the problems involved in the differences thus shown to exist between populations that are ethnologically identical, or that stand at nearly the same level of educational culture and economic well being.

_Germany's High Suicide Rates_

The extremely high suicide rate of the Germanic peoples long ago attracted the attention of European sociologists, but, so far as I know, it has never been satisfactorily explained. If it were limited to adults it might possibly be attributed to economic causes, particularly to the rapid development of manufacturing industry, which seems everywhere to increase the suicidal tendency; but self-destruction in Germany is almost as common among children as among grown people. Between 1883 and 1903 there were 1,125 suicides among the pupils of the public schools in Prussia alone, and most of them were of boys and girls under fifteen years of age. An investigation made by the ministry of public instruction showed that this prevalence of suicide among children was not due to the conditions of modern life in cities, inasmuch as the proportion of cases was fully as large in places of the smallest size as in crowded centers of population. It seemed to be due, rather, to an inherent suicidal tendency in the race.

Racial characteristics, however, do not by any means account for the extraordinary differences in suicide rates that we find among the European peoples, as shown in the following table:[21]

EUROPEAN PEOPLES GROUPED RACIALLY

NUMBER OF SUICIDES PER MILLION INHABITANTS

I. SLAVS

In Dalmatia (about 1896) 14 European Russia (1900) 31 Bulgaria (about 1900) 118

II. SCANDINAVIANS

In Norway (1901-'05) 65 Sweden (1900-'04) 142 Denmark (1901-'05) 227

III. LATINS

In Spain (1893) 21 Portugal (1906) 23 Italy (1901-'05) 64 France (1900-'04) 227

IV. GERMANS

In Austria (1902) 173 Prussia (1902-'06) 201 Saxony (1902-06) 324 Bavaria (1902-'06) 141

V. ENGLISH

In Ireland (1906) 34 Scotland (1905) 65 England and Wales (1906) 100 Australasia (1903) 121 United States (1907) 126

VI. ASIATICS

In Japan (1905) 209

It is difficult to assign definite or satisfactory reasons for the wide differences shown in the above table. Skelton has suggested that the low suicide rates of certain countries are due to emigration, "which provides an outlet for a great deal of misery and constitutes a hopeful alternative to suicide"; but this conjecture, although ingenious, is hardly supported by the facts. It might perhaps explain the low suicide rates of Italy and Ireland, but it does not account for the equally low suicide rate of the Russian peasants, who emigrate hardly at all, nor for the extremely high suicide rate of the Germans, who emigrate in large numbers. Neither does it throw any light upon the persistence of national suicide rates long after emigration. The generalization that seems to harmonize and explain the greatest number of facts is that suicide is most prevalent in countries where education goes hand in hand with highly developed manufacturing industry. In Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Russia the people have little education, manufacturing industries are feebly developed, and the suicide rate is low. In Saxony the percentage of illiteracy is very small, more than half of the population work in factories, and the suicide rate is the highest in Europe. I do not dare to assert that even this rude generalization is warranted by the facts; but, if it were sustained, it would seem to show that suicide is a by-product of the great, complicated machine that we call modern civilization.

Whatever may be the reasons for differences in national suicide rates, and whatever may be the causes that have produced them, there is little doubt, I think, that the rates themselves are true manifestations of national character, and that they are as permanent as the character of which they are an outcome. When, therefore, a people migrates from one place to another, it takes both its character and its suicide rate to the new location. This is clearly apparent in the vital statistics of immigrants who come from various parts of Europe to the United States. Such immigrants, as a rule, prosper here and become happier here, but the increased prosperity and happiness do not greatly affect the suicidal tendencies that they had when they were poor and wretched in their original homes. Even their descendants, born in America, keep substantially unchanged the suicide rates that they have inherited, with their character, from their European ancestors. The Germans who came here forty or fifty years ago brought a high suicide rate with them, and their descendants maintain it. The Irish, on the contrary, brought a low suicide rate to this country, and their children have it still. In the following table will be found the suicide rates of a few nationalities in Europe and of their descendants in the United States.[22]

SUICIDES PER MILLION OF POPULATION

NATIONALITIES IN EUROPE IN THE U. S.

Native Americans 68 Hungarians 114 118 Germans 213 193 French 228 220 English 100 104

In an address delivered before the Anthropological Society of Washington, D. C., on October 19, 1880, Mr. M. B. W. Hough said: "As long as the features of the ancestor are repeated in his descendants, so long will the traits of his character reappear. Language may change, customs be left behind, races may migrate from place to place and subsist on whatever the country they occupy affords; but their fundamental characteristics will survive, because they are comparatively uninfluenced by the mere accidents of nutrition." This statement is as true of suicide as it is of other manifestations of national character.

_Odd Methods Employed by Suicides_

Nothing is more surprising in the records of suicide than the extraordinary variety and novelty of the methods to which man has resorted in his efforts to escape from the sufferings and misfortunes of life. One would naturally suppose that a person who had made up his mind to commit suicide would do so in the easiest, most convenient, and least painful way; but the literature of the subject proves conclusively that hundreds of suicides, every year, take their lives in the most difficult, agonizing, and extraordinary ways; and that there is hardly a possible or conceivable method of self-destruction that has not been tried. When I clipped from a newspaper my first case of self-cremation with kerosene and a match, I regarded it as rather a remarkable and unusual method of taking life; but I soon discovered that self-cremation is comparatively common. When I learned that Mary Reinhardt, of New York, had sung "Rock of Ages" and had then killed herself by inhaling gas in a barrel stuffed with pillows, I thought it a curious and noteworthy case; but when I compared it with suicides that came to my knowledge later, it seemed quite simple and natural. I have well-authenticated cases in which men or women have committed suicide by hanging themselves, or taking poison, in the tops of high trees; by throwing themselves upon swiftly revolving circular saws; by exploding dynamite in their mouths; by thrusting red-hot pokers down their throats; by hugging red-hot stoves; by stripping themselves naked and allowing themselves to freeze to death on winter snow-drifts out of doors, or on piles of ice in refrigerator-cars; by lacerating their throats on barbed-wire fences; by drowning themselves head downward in barrels; by suffocating themselves head downward in chimneys; by diving into white-hot coke-ovens; by throwing themselves into craters of volcanoes; by shooting themselves with ingenious combinations of a rifle with a sewing-machine; by strangling themselves with their hair; by swallowing poisonous spiders; by piercing their hearts with corkscrews and darning-needles; by cutting their throats with hand-saws and sheep-shears; by hanging themselves with grape vines; by swallowing strips of under-clothing and buckles of suspenders; by forcing teams of horses to tear their heads off; by drowning themselves in vats of soft soap; by plunging into retorts of molten glass; by jumping into slaughter-house tanks of blood; by decapitation with home-made guillotines; and by self-crucifixion.

Of course, persons who resort to such methods as these are, in most cases, mentally unsound. A man who shoots, hangs, poisons, or drowns himself may be sane; but the man who crucifies himself, buries himself alive, cuts his throat on a barbed-wire fence, or climbs into the top of a tree to take poison, is evidently on the border-line of insanity, even if he be not a recognized lunatic.

The most prevalent methods of suicide in Europe are, first, hanging, second, drowning. In the United States they are, first, poisoning, second, shooting. About three fourths of all the persons who commit suicide in the United States use pistol or poison. The difference between European and American methods is probably due to the fact that on the other side of the Atlantic drugs and fire-arms are not so easily obtainable as they are here, and Europeans therefore resort to water and the rope as the best and surest means accessible. Police restrictions and regulations make it almost impossible for a Russian peasant to get either poison or a pistol; but all the police in the empire cannot prevent him from drowning himself in a pond, or hanging himself in his own barn.

A careful comparison of all the facts accessible seems to show that in Europe, at least, suicide bears a certain definite relation to education and manufactures; and that, as I have already said, it is a by-product of the great, complicated world-machine that we call modern civilization. Its specific causes, so far as they can be ascertained, are, on the educational side, the development of increased nervous and psychic sensibility, which makes men feel more acutely all wants, deprivations, misfortunes, and sufferings; and, on the manufacturing side, a monotony of employment which wearies and exhausts the body while it gives little exercise to the educated mind and leaves the latter free to brood over its unsatisfied longings and desires, as well as its many trials and disappointments. There are other causes, such as the growing disproportion between wants generally and the means of gratification generally; alcoholism; unhealthful work, especially in manufacturing districts; barrack and tenement-house life; and all the evils incident to poverty, overcrowding, and bad sanitary conditions in cities. So far as I can see, these causes, at present, are not removable. Education must continue to intensify sensibility and increase the number of men's wants, and the great economic machine must grind on, even though it crush thousands of human beings, every year, in the cogs of its innumerable wheels. A high suicide rate is part of the price that we pay for the educational and material achievements upon which we pride ourselves. We have greatly multiplied the means of human happiness, but whether, on the whole, we have increased the sum total of human happiness is perhaps an open question. In any event, the high and rapidly increasing suicide rate shows that we are pushing the weaklings to the wall.

The question of what can be done to lessen the suicide tendency and check this great waste of human power and energy brings me to the only important cause of self-destruction which seems to me removable, and that is newspaper publicity. No argument is needed to prove that man is essentially an imitative animal. In dress, in behavior, in speech, in modes of thought, and in social conventions, we are all prone to do what we see others do; and when unhappy men and women learn, from the newspapers, that scores of other unhappy people are daily escaping from their troubles through the always open door of suicide, when familiarity with the idea of self-destruction deprives the act of all its natural terror, it is not at all surprising that they yield to what seems to be the general current of their social environment. I have, in my own collection of material, a surprisingly large number of cases in which the suicidal act may be traced directly to newspaper publicity and imitation; but I must limit myself to a single striking illustration--the suicidal epidemic in Emporia, Kansas, in the summer of 1901. As a result, apparently, of the publication of the details of two or three suicides of people prominent in that little Kansas town, there broke out an epidemic of self-destruction which culminated in the sunny, flowery month of June, and which carried the annual suicide rate from about 90 per million to 1,665 per million--a rate five times greater than that of Saxony. Mr. Morse, the mayor of the city, consulted the Board of Health, and decided to stop the publication of the details of suicides in the local papers, even if it should require the employment of force. He issued a proclamation, on the 16th of June, in which he said: "I have consulted the Board of Health, and if the Emporia papers do not comply with my request, I shall have a right to stop, and I will stop summarily, the publication of these suicide details, under the law providing for the suppression of epidemics. There is clearly an epidemic in this city, and although it is mental, it is none the less deadly. Its contagion may be clearly shown to come from what is known in medicine as the psychic suggestion, found in the publication of the details of suicides. If the paper on which the local journals are printed had been kept in a place infected with small-pox, I could demand that the journals stop using that paper, or stop publication. If they spread another contagion--the contagious suggestion of suicide--I believe the liberty of the press is not to be considered before the public welfare, and that the courts would sustain me in using force to prevent the publication of newspapers containing matter clearly deleterious to the public health."

I believe that the reasoning of Mayor Morse is perfectly sound, and that the position taken by him is absolutely impregnable. The prevention of the publication of suicides in the newspapers of a State would require a special legislative act, but it would probably do more to lessen the suicidal tendency than any other single measure that could be taken. In the winter of 1902, Representative Jenkins introduced in the National House of Representatives a bill making periodicals containing details of suicides unmailable; but I think it was never reported from committee.

_The Emotional Temperament as a Cause_

There is one other way in which the suicide rate may possibly be lowered, or at least held in check, and that is through the cultivation of what may be called the heroic spirit. We are becoming too emotional and sentimental, and too much inclined to regard weakness with sympathy, instead of with the contempt that it generally deserves. In the language of the prize ring, the pugilist who lies down while he can yet stand and see is called a "quitter." It would be harsh and unjust to apply to all suicides this opprobrious name; but there can be little doubt, I think, that the majority of them are weaklings who give up and lie down while they still have a fighting chance.

Readers of shipping news may still remember the wreck of a German kerosene steamer on the wildest, most precipitous part of the coast of Newfoundland, in February, 1901. The steamer took fire during a heavy winter gale, and the captain ran her ashore, at the nearest point of land, with the hope of saving the lives of the crew. She struck on a submerged reef in a little cove, about an eighth of a mile from a coast which was three or four hundred feet high and as precipitous as a wall. When she was first seen by a few fishermen at daylight, her boats were gone, and all of her crew had apparently perished except three men. Two were standing on the bridge, and one was lashed aloft in the fore-rigging. About ten o'clock in the forenoon a tremendous sea carried away the bridge and the two men on it, and they were seen no more. At three o'clock in the afternoon the solitary survivor,--the man in the fore-rigging,--who was evidently suffering intensely from hunger and cold, unlashed himself, threshed his arms against his body for five minutes to restore the circulation in them, and then took off his coat, waved his hand to the fishermen on top of the cliff, climbed down the shrouds, and plunged into the sea--but not to commit suicide. He swam to the shore, made three attempts in different places to get a footing among the rocks at the base of the cliff, but was swept away every time by the surf, and finally abandoned the attempt as hopeless. At that crisis in the struggle ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have given up and allowed themselves to drown; but this man was not a "quitter." He turned his face again seaward, struck out for the half-submerged ship, and after a long and desperate struggle succeeded in reaching her and getting on board. He climbed the fore-shrouds, waved his hand to the pitying but powerless fishermen on the edge of the cliff, and lashed himself again in the rigging. At intervals, until dark, he made signals to the fishermen to show that he was yet alive. At daybreak on the following morning he could still be seen in the fore-rigging, but his head had fallen on his breast and he was motionless. He had frozen to death in the night. That man died, as a man in adverse circumstances ought to die, fighting to the last. You may call it foolish, and say that he might better have ended his sufferings by allowing himself to drown when he found that he could not make a landing at the base of the cliff; but deep down in your hearts you pay secret homage to his courage, his endurance, and his indomitable will. He was defeated at last, but, so long as he had consciousness, neither fire nor cold nor tempest could break down his manhood.

The Caucasian mountaineers have a proverb which says: "Heroism is endurance for one moment more." That proverb recognizes the fact that in this world the human spirit, with its dominating force, the will, may be and ought to be superior to all bodily sensations and all accidents of environment. We should not only feel, but we should teach, by our conversation and by our literature, that, in the struggle of life, it is essentially a noble thing and a heroic thing to die fighting. In a recent psychological story called "My Friend Will," Charles F. Lummis pays a striking tribute to the power of the human mind over the accidents of life and chance when he makes his "friend Will" say: "I am bigger than anything that can happen to me. All these things--sorrow, misfortune, and suffering--are outside my door. I'm in the house and I've got the key!"

PRAIRIE DAWN

BY WILLA SIBERT CATHER

A crimson fire that vanquishes the stars; A pungent odor from the dusty sage; A sudden stirring of the huddled herds; A breaking of the distant table-lands Through purple mists ascending, and the flare Of water ditches silver in the light; A swift, bright lance hurled low across the world; A sudden sickness for the hills of home.

--_From April Twilights._

THE DOINGS OF THE DEVIL

BY HARVEY J. O'HIGGINS

ILLUSTRATIONS BY THOMAS FOGARTY