THE PROBABLE INCREASE OF SUICIDE.
IT seems very probable, we should say it is almost certain, that for some years to come the offence of suicide will increase in Great Britain. The mania for killing oneself remarked during the past month, which has attracted the attention of the police, and induced magistrates to stultify themselves by threatening impri- sonment to women who have already faced death, has not indeed much bearing on the general question. Moral epidemics of that kind spread as rapidly and as unaccountably as diseases, and are just as little amenable to human control. Suicide sometimes breaks out in a community like scarlet fever, and though society by careful precaution may prevent its recurrence that particular outburst can never be arrested or cured. It must just run its course and die away by degrees. But there are general tendencies at work which threaten to make suicide for the future much more frequent, and which may deserve to be closely watched by the light of the returns of mortality. In the first place the old deter- rents to the offence are either falling into disuse or rapidly passing away. Juries have become not only unfavourable but hostile to verdicts of fele de se, and the ancient fear of the suicide, the something unhallowed to happen to his body after death, has dis- appeared fromsociety. We suspect it had a good deal of influence, that the burial by torchlight and the stake and all the rest of the ecclesiastical penalties, cruel and silly as they were, had great weight with the desponding class which rids itself of life. The uneducated really feared them, as they fear to this day the notion of being " buried in a ditch like a dog," and the educated though aware that the body becomes manure and passes into the trees and the grass and the flowers, whether in consecrated ground or at four cross roads, still disliked the disgrace such a burial reflected on their relatives. People care about their own corpses if not from reason then from instinct. Sir Charles Napier, who like most men of genius had a way of entering into the thoughts of people below himself, onceattacked a mania for suicide after a fashion very different from Mr. Cooke's. The better class women of Scinde were killing themselves at an astounding rate,-200 died in a very few weeks, and he had an objection to their doing that or anything else with- out his previous permission. Accordingly he resolved to put a- stop to the practice, but being a man of genius instead of a mem- ber of Parliament he did not order every woman who failed in the first attempt to make a second under penalty of imprisonment and a heartless investigation, but proclaimed that the body of the next: woman who died should be hung up by one leg naked in the market-place. Suicide ended. The women could face death, but they wanted dead or alive to look decent, and that being impos- sible when dead preferred to keep alive. The old verdicts had much the effect of that order, very unreasonably perhaps, but then the human race is not as a rule guided by pure reason. Then, strange as it seems, the more genial and truthful views of God an death and the future which are striking so deep into society, though they repress crime,—which always grows fierce with the ferocity of the repressing creed,—also tend, especially among rough natures, to diminish the fear of death. People begin to perceive more clearly that God is loving, and with the strange perversity of human nature which bewilders theologians they fancy they will be more directly under His care in the next life than they are already in this. Like the man who declared the Book of Job false because it makes Satan talk with God, they fancy it possible to be out of the presence of the Omnipresent, to be as it were forgotten of Heaven. That is the internal feeling which produces the otherwise inexplicable crime, the slaughter of children by loving parents just. as they are about to shift off their own responsibility. Mrs. Legge at Reading last week could not bear to leave her children to God in this world, so she sent them to demand His care in the next and then jumped into the river herself. As the horror of death dimi- nishes the instinctive horror of suicide as an incident in one's career must of necessity diminish also. The horror of it as a sin. ought to increase, but the sin is precisely the feature of the act the miserable do not see.
The gross deterrent, the fear of death, and the superstitious de- terrent, the fear of consequences to the corpse, are both passing away, while the provocatives are becoming daily stronger. Three. distinct temptations to suicide are increasing with every move- ment of the age, the pace of life, the dread of opinion, and the un- precedented development of foresight among those hitherto uneducated. We do not attribute to the first cause the positive influence the Times is inclined to assign to it, but it operates in a negative way very strongly. Those who really live the pace of the day do not commit suicide, their interests are too various, their thoughts too little introverted, but the rapidity of the movement. around them weakens the resisting power of those who do commit. it, the brooding and the melancholy, diminishes their conceit in themselves,—conceited people don't hang themselves,—lessens their- power to bear up against the rushing tide of events. The increaseci power of opinion is a much more immediate cause of self- destruction. A very large proportion of suicides are caused by a. fear of that power, which is wholly new in degree though not. in kind. It was always a terrible thing to lose character, but still the loss was remediable, the victim could remove to another place where he or she was as unknown as if dropped from the clouds, and begin life afresh without the sense of a perpetual stigma. That is all over now, the press and the railway have brought light into the dark places, and the most secluded village in Britain is now as public as Holborn or Cheapside. We have little doubt, looking at the facts that in the Reading case the statement of Legge's brother was strictly true, that Legge was not married to the unhappy suicide, and that the imme Hate feeling which prompted her to crime was not the loss of her means of maintenance, but the loss plus that of a ci aracter which she knew after Legge's desertion it would be im- possible to redeem. Convicts complain every day in the police- court that their sentence follows them everywhere, and it is true that to the respectable, i. e., to those who feel social stigmas, the world when their characters are once tainted is becoming one vast prison-house. As the sense of honour develops among the multi- tudes, and that it is developing fast all familiar with the poor well know, this will be perhaps the strongest of all the temptations to suicide. It is already the most apparent, at least one-half of the cases which reach the police-courts being suicides committed by girls whose lovers have betrayed and deserted them.
The largest cause of all, however, we believe, is the increase of foresight, the development of imagination among the millions. As they rise, and they rise fast,—how fast will not be perceived till the men of fifty die off,—to the feelings of the educated, they come also within the circle of their temptations, and one of those temptations is an abject fear of the future. The crowd which dwells around the broad base of the social pyramid had thirty years ago no foresight, lived on from day to day, never thought of the morrow, could not in millions of instances understand the value or the dread of anything not close at hand, of a pension for instance, or thirty years of imprisonmeut instead of twenty. They have been carefully taught to understand, to provide for old age, to study the future, to realize that life and its cares do not end with the week just passing away. Conse- quently they perceive as they never perceived before the conse- quences of their acts, the results which will come but have not come from their misfortunes. A great employer of labour told us recently that the greatest change which in thirty years he had noticed in the mental condition of his people was in this respect, that a dread such as the educated poor constantly feel had settled in his villages, and had as he thought taken much of happiness out of life. Millions are rising to the rank of educated poor, learning to worry about possible stoppages of wages, about savings, about their children's education and prospects, about their own chance of escaping the workhouse in old age. Poverty is a very close neighbour to these people, and they fear it with a fear which strangles cheerfulness in its birth. For one result they accept the principle of insurance by hundreds of thousands, but for another they will feel the temptations to suicide as their social superiors feel them, and yet more keenly than they, for these know by experience what the others only dread. Everywhere we hear among the masses of plans which regard the future,—of societies which will give annuities after twenty years, of building associations only profitable when ten years have expired, of tontines, " mutual aids," and funds to provide against sickness. They are all good things, but they all prove that the one faculty latent among the masses of all old countries,—imagination,—is getting vivified, and we must accept the evils as well as the good effects of that awakening. We can no more have foresight without despondency than physical long- sightedness without the tendency to flatness of the pupil which dims the eyes in old age. It may be that with the danger the correctives will arrive, that life will grow palpably easier, that physical discomfort may become as unknown in Europe as in Ohio, that a healthier training may remove other and equal causes of depression ; but in the interim period, while millions are acquiring education without obtaining prosperity, using their imaginations without aught to make their dreams pleasant, we shall, we may rely on it, see a perceptible increase in the crime of suicide.
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