It is not, perhaps, surprising that the returns of suicides
in great cities make Paris the chief capital of suicide. That is just what one would expect from the chief capital of pleasure. If you make pleasure your main object, you are pretty sure,
n ot, indeed, to commit suicide, but to learn very rapidly to onderstand something of the state of mind from which suicide proceeds. In Paris, for every million of inhabitants there are 402 suicides, while in Naples there are only 31. We sup- pose that the physical nature in Naples is too much at ease to conspire with the mind against the habit of living. The capital next to Paris in suicidal tendency is Stockholm, why, it
is very hard to say. In Stockholm the proportion is 354 suicides to a million of inhabitants ; Copenhagen comes next, and then Vienna, Brussels, Dresden, St. Petersburg, Florence, Berlin, New York, Genoa, London, and Rome, in order. In London there are only 87 suicides to each million of inhabitants. Yet one would have hardly conceived this order to have represented the descending scale of irritability of temperament, or of liability to physical suffering.
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