THE ETHICS OF SUICIDE.

fANE of those tragedies which every now and then break up the ki polished surface of polite society has come to light during the past week in Ireland. A baronet of one of the noblest Irish families has an execution for 300/. put into his country house. He goes to Dublin to try to arrange a loan to stave off the end for another short term, finds it hopeless, sits down and writes a note to a friend,—" Dear NED,—I am going to ask a favour of you, and that is that you will get your wife to break the sad news of my death to poor Lady Fitzgerald. I go down this evening, and my poor body will be found in the Suir, by Pig-hole, where all the salmon are taken, near where the white thorn stump is that was lately cut. The Lord have mercy on me and my poor family.—Yours truly, Taos.

FrrznEnArn." He takes the train and gets home at midnight, "driving the car himself very carefully," as the coachman tells the jury on the inquest, and being "unusually silent, as if he had been disappointed in something." Takes tea ; goes up to his wife's room, and leaves a note for her while she sleeps ; unbolts the hall door, and goes straight to the Pig-hole, "where all the salmon are taken," and, leaving his coat and hat on the bank, takes a plunge in the Suir, and ends the whole tangled business which has already got quite beyond his management. Sir Thomas was known as a fine swimmer, but the police find him stark dead in the shallow water, 200 yards below the Pig-hole.

There is something in most suicides which blunts the edge of human judgment, at least in our clay. We turn from the stern old law of our forefathers, and draw the veil of temporary insanity over the end of all persons (in the upper classes at least) who have laid violent bands on their own lives. The burial by the highway, with no religious ceremony over the grave, and a stake driven through the body, has been discardedas useless and brutal ; and the forfeiture of all goods and chattels to the sovereign has become a dead letter. This is all as it should be. The fear of capital pun- ishment may deter the possible murderer from taking another man's life, but we suppose no one would contend that the fear of ignominious burial ever hindered a man from taking his own ; as to the forfeiture of personal estate (when the blood of a felo de se was not corrupted, nor his estates of inheritance forfeited), it is difficult to reconcile such a penalty with the principles of our law, and it is utterly opposed to equity and common sense, inasmuch as it was a simple laying of the burden of a man's crime on those who had already suffered most by it.

But it is one thing to rejoice over the disuse or powerlessness

of savage old laws, and quite another to assent to some modern theories on the subject, which, to judge from our own experience, must be somewhat rife amongst us. In no fewer than three different societies we have heard it maintained within the last few days, that suicide is no crime at all ; that it is not contrary to natural morality, but in entire accordance with it ; that a man should exercise absolute control over his own life, should use his discretion as to when and how to keep it, spend it, or throw it away, exactly as he does with respect to any other piece of property. It is urged further, that the Christian faith, so far as it speaks at all on the subject, must be taken to sanction this view. You acknowledge, it is said, self-sacrifice as the very foundation of the law of God. You preach the sacrifice of life as the highest sacri- fice, where do you draw the line ? A jumps into the water to save a drowning child, gets drowned himself, and you very rightly pension his family and call him a hero. B sits down on his bed, considers within himself whether he is likely to profit himself or any other living soul by staying in the world. Having for his part come to a definite conclusion, B puts a pistol in his mouth and blows his brains out, and you say he has been guilty of a great crime; and, but that he must have been mad, you would dishonour his name and ruin his family. Your morality may be sound, but you must go elsewhere than to Christianity to support it.

If it is only meant that the definite command, "Thou shalt not take thine own life," is not to be found in so many words in the New Testament, we readily admit the position. We have heard arguments in favour of many other miscalled human rights, of polygamy, for instance, based on the like grounds, and are not going to waste time in proving that the faith which teaches that every power and gift comes direct from God as a trust to man, and not as a property, can lend no shadow of a sanction to the notion that the wonderful gift of life is an exception to the universal law. But there is no need to appeal to Christian ethics. The old heathen saw clear down into the heart of this matter, as he strolled under the grey olives in the bright Attic air. "The Great Cap- tain has set you in your ranks, you may not break your rank on the strength of your own private notions, it is an outrage on the common life in which your own is bound up," is the sum of the thoughts of Plato and his great master on the subject, and without appealing to a greater than Plato or his master we can be quite content to rest the case on their teaching. The ground-motive of suicide is cowardice. A man will not meet some one of the consequences which his own acts have raised up to confront him ; shame or dishonour, real or fancied, stare him in the face, casting the whole visible creation into the shade, and the invisible can hold nothing more terrible for him in its mysterious depths. There he may escape from his enemy ; here he quails and owns himself vanquished ; and then comes the pistol, or the deep pool in the river.

At the same time we should be the last to deny the strange diffi- culties which surround the question when we come to test the rule. It would be difficult perhaps to name a case in which one could say that a man was justified in taking his own life ; but, on the other hand, there are instances of suicides by women which it is impossible to condemn—which indeed are accepted by the com- mon human conscience as righteous acts. A notable example was given some time since by a writer on the subject of American slavery (Miss Martineau, we believe) of a slave girl, with scarcely a drop of black blood in her veins, who killed herself to save her own honour and her nearest male relative from the crime of incest. Nor is it easy to lay one's finger on the weak place in the argu- ment of the Hindoo widow in the following story, which came to us from a person who had it direct from the chief actor.

Before suttee had been put down in British India, an officer in command of an out-of-the-way station had notice of the death of a native gentleman who lived near, and that his widow was about to be burnt. He took measures to stop the ceremony, the result of which was a visit from the lady herself. She did not come to thank him, or to put herself under his protection ; she came to remonstrate against the cruelty and injustice of the course he was pursuing. She had lived an honoured life, she said ; her duty, her

religion, her inclination, all pointed to this as the only fitting end of it; her relatives and friends all expected this sacrifice from her ; she was ready, anxious to make it. He urged upon her the uselessness of the act, the painfulness of the death she was court- ing. She scoffed at the pain, a question of five or ten minutes at the most, shehad lived with her husband for thirty years—in youth and middle age,—he was expecting her, he was waiting for her on the other side of the great river, he would wait for her, she knew,

till to-morrow, and then would start on his journey, and she should never overtake him again through all the long "for ever." officer, though sorely touched and puzzled by her pleading, remained firm, and she left him. Late at night the sentry reported that a white figure was wandering about the compound ; he was ordered to arrest it, and brought in the poor widow. Again the officer remonstrated with her, asking why she had not gone home. I have no home,' she answered, you have taken it away.' The puzzled Englishman did all that he could for her consistently with his duty ; but burn she must not, so she pined and died in a few weeks.

While we hold that the advocates of the right of suicide have no case, we have, however, little sympathy with those who, on the other hand, regard the mere visible animal life of man with a sort of superstitious awe. There are scores of cases in which men should throw away their:lives joyfully, should even risk those of others ; and we honour, and rightly honour, above all others, those who have been the readiest to do this when the right call came. We acknowledge it asithe supreme test of human nobleness. The

man who has counted the cost, and is ready to pay with his life, wields a power in human affairs and over men's hearts which can be gotten in no other-sway. "I am ready not only to be bound, but to die," said St. Paul, and in that strength overcame Jewish sects and Roman Empire.ZIs not :Garibaldi's strength of the same kind ? Take away the man's loyal venture of his life wherever it

could be risked for the faith he holds, and what would be left that could move men as he has the power to move them ?

But there is a mystery about the subject of human life which we must be content to scrutinize:without much result. What, for instance, can we say to some eases of idiotcy, or to those most painful of all cases, not uncommon, as every doctor knows, in which what was a man or woman goes on, living we cannot call it, but stopping in this world, by the mere action of the organs of diges- tion? All that was manly, human, God-like, in them has fled. Is there any sacredness about what is left? 'Though no human eye can recognize him, may we deem that the man is there still—that it is not that the Great Captain has forgotten to call him, but that he is yet in the absolutely:best place for him in all the universe ?

Yes, surely, unless our faith is vain, we may hold with steadfast- ness,

" That nothing walks with aimless feet—

That not one life shall be destroyed, Or cast as rubbish to the void, When God has made the pile complete ;"

and that He, as the old heathen philosopher saw and taught, has set the battle in array, and given us each our appointed place in the ranks He is a Captain who may be trusted to give the word to each of us when Ithe:time has come for us to pile arms ; in the

meantime, "shoulder to shoulder, and fight it out to the last," is the only word for a man, though the world may be all a muddle, and we may seem to have [so completely missed our way that the best thing remaining for us is to find some old familiar corner, some "Pig-hole, where all the salmon are taken, near where the white thorn stump is that was lately cut," and there get done with it all, after the manner of the poor distracted Irish baronet.