cils of Bragues and Auxerre, that Christian sepulture should be refused to the bodies of persons who killed themselves. But even then, after this example had been given by the ecclesiastical authority, civil legislation was in no hurry to follow. Down to the time of Charlemagne, reluctances still showed themselves; it was not until the great emperor was buried that the Codes began (under pressure from the Church) to confirm the refusal of prayers in cases of suicide. This helped to conquer hesitations: the feeling on the matter began to grow in every Christian land; it became, by degrees, intensely bitter; and at last self-killing got to be regarded as a hideously criminal offence, and became punishable with all the ferocities that the inventive cruelty of the Middle Ages could devise. Before 1270 St. Louis prescribed the confiscation of the property of all persons who made away with themselves, and in this way associated their families in the disgrace and the punishment of their act. And then, at the commencement of the fourteenth century, a tide of still intenser fierceness began to mount, and nations set to work to compete with each other in the contriving of new barbarities and of fresh contumelies. In some countries the bodies of self-murderers were dragged through the streets face downward, on a hurdle, and thrown on to the public dirt-heap, or else hung up to rot; in others they were buried in a highway with a stake driven through them; in others, again, they were not allowed to be brought out at the door of the house, but were pulled through a hole dug under it on purpose. Michelet tells us, in his "Origines du Droit Français," that "if a man stabbed himself, a piece of wood, with the dugger in it, was stuck into the ground at his head; if he drowned himself in the sea, he was buried on the shore five feet from the water; if he drowned himself in a well, he was interred on a hill, with three stones on him-one on the head, one on the chest, and one on the feet." The practice of trying corpses for self-murder grew largely into use-which was but natural; for what more convenient fashion of obtaining money could a seigneur employ than to seize the inheritance of a dead man? Why, Dangeau declares that the ladies of the Court of Versailles used to augment their pin-money by wheedling the king into giving them grants of these strange legacies! The treatment of the dead grew so outrageous that Montesquieu exclaimed, "The laws are furious against those who kill themselves; they are forced, as it were, to die a second time. It seems to me that these laws are very unjust.'

Other people thought so too. The philosophers of the eighteenth century began to attack this cruel legislation. Beccaria followed them he said, with infinite force and truth, in his admirable treatise on crime and punishment, Suicide is an offence which is not susceptible of any punishment, properly so called, for punishment

can fall only on a lifeless body or on innocent heirs. But punishment enforced on the lifeless remains of a convict is much like whipping a statue; while its application to an innocent family is odious and tyrannical, for there is an end of liberty if punishment ceases to be purely personal." All these arguments were, however, useless. It was not until the revolution that this monstrous jurisprudence was suppressed in France, and, by her example, throughout almost all the rest of Europe successively. As has been already said, suicide is no longer a civil crime in several continental countries. The Code Napoléon takes no notice of it. In Germany some of the local laws still forbid religious burial for suicided persons, while others are silent on the subject; no fixed rule exists there unless indeed the new empire has recently introduced uniformity of action. In England legislation contradicts itself on this subject, as on so many others: suicide is murder, but the attempt to commit is only a misdemeanor; so that, in our hands, the legal gravity of the act lies, not in the intention, but in success.

With such a fluctuating history as this before us, we ought in fairness to regard with patience the opinions contrary to our own which so many of our predecessors have held on the question, and which so many of our contemporaries still entertain. However certain we may be that our view is the only right one, we ought, on the undeniable principle that "every feeling really felt is true in the person who feels it," to contemplate without too angry blame the unlucky people who are impelled to kill themselves. And we ought to do this all the more because of the generalized character and universal action of suicide-because of its application in all classes as well as in all time Historically, of course, it presents the aspects of a luxury; for history talks only of the examples of it which have been supplied by the rich, the learned, and the high-placed. But in reality it has always been, and still is, essentially, a poor man's remedy; it has prompted the vulgar more than the delicate, the rough more than the polished. It admits no exclusions from the ranks of its victims. Furthermore, it is not always easy to determine what is suicide and what is not. There are scrupulous persons who might imagine that Samson put himself within it when he pulled down the columns of Gaza upon his head; or that Regulus ran too closely to the wind when he went back to Carthage on purpose to be murdered. People, indeed, might not impossibly be found who would go farther stillwho, captiously and censoriously, would ask whether a sailor has a right to blow up his ship rather than haul down his flag, or a soldier to refuse quarter rather than be taken prisoner-and who would deny that the particular emotion called patriotism can take away the stain from these forms of voluntary death.

It has been already remarked that a signal revival of suicide has L. M. iv-6

occurred during the last hundred years. Its rate, calculated as an average on the entire population of Europe, without distinction of nationality or of local variations, seems to have more than quintupled since the middle of last century. Exact returns are not obtainable from every country, but the information is sufficiently complete to enable us to perceive that Europeans are now killing themselves at an average annual rate of one in five thousand; and that, consequently, a total of somewhere about 60,000 persons are dying by their own hand each year on the continent and in the British Isles. One fourth of them, in round figures, are mad; the rest act knowingly, with a view to some presumed advantage. And it must not be forgotten that the numbers are constantly and regularly increasing, and also that they include only the suicides which are officially known and those which succeed; neither those which are concealed by families nor the unsuccessful attempts are counted anywhere. Consequently, if we wish to correctly value the force of the present distinctly marked reawakening of the suicidal tendency, we must add a good deal for undetected cases and for failures. Ineffectual ventures especially would seem, from private information, to be considerably more abundant than is commonly imagined. It would probably be quite safe to suppose that these two unappended elements increase the European annual total by one half, so carrying it to about 90,000.

The rates vary, however, very largely in different countries, with local conditions, with race, with latitude, with education. The figures are immensely higher, as a general rule, in the north (excepting only Russia) than in the south, and in towns than in the country. It is not easy to collect absolutely reliable returns for each separate land; but if we may trust M. Maurice Block, who is about the safest statistician of our time, the Danes kill themselves the most, and the Portuguese the least, the difference between these two extremes reaching the scarcely credible proportion of 35 to 1. Saxony, Prussia, France, and Norway follow next to Denmark, and after these come successively Bavaria, England, Belgium, Austria, Russia, Italy, and Spain. Throughout the continent, with few exceptions, the rate of suicide diminishes with latitude. The causes of this unconformity have been keenly dis cussed, and, as we shall see presently, their main outlines have been approximately traced; but the subject is so full of compli cations, of details, and of intermixing and counteracting agencies, that we are still far from a complete general view of the laws which guide it. We do know positively that climate has nothing whatever to do with it, but that is only a negative discovery. No author has yet collected data as to the comparative influence on the suicidal disposition of the special conditions of life, of health, of character in each district of Europe, so as to enable him to point

with certainty to the precise reasons why a good many of the inhabitants of one province should elect to kill themselves, while almost all those of another province should prefer natural deaths. There is a curious and interesting investigation to be made here it is possible that the information exists already, locally, and that it only needs to be agglomerated; but, thus far, no one has undertaken the task of drawing it together, and we must continue for the present in ignorance of the principles which regulate the geographical distribution of suicide in Europe.

But if we cannot see our way yet with precision on this part of the question, we are better informed as to the causes of the prevalence of suicide in towns as compared with the country. We know, for instance, very exactly, why one inhabitant in eighteen hundred kills himself each year in Paris; and we can judge approximately, from that example, of the state of things in other cities. No insight into the sufferings and the desperations which may exist unseen in dense populations can be more instructive or more impressive than that which is offered to us by the detailed list of the motives of the eleven hundred yearly suicides of Paris. All the habitual forms of desolation and hopelessness are enumerated there; and if their stranger and more unwonted shapes are not included too, we may be sure that the sole reason is, that no official denomination exists for them in the technical language of police offices; they operate, but they operate unnamed. The catalogue is, however, long enough and sad enough as it is; it amply sets forth the miseries which are generated by life in crowds, and the crimes which those miseries entail. And as these miseries act mainly on the laboring classes, it is natural that the great majority of the suicides should be found among the poor: five sixths of them, in round figures, are shown by the registers to be committed by working people. But it should be at once added that this proportion is in no way special to Paris, or indeed to any town or any land; it is approximately the same everywhere. In no case do the upper classes or the liberal professions constitute more than a fifth or a sixth of the published totals, and that is why allusion was made just now to the generalized character of suicide, and to its dissemination among all the strata which compose societies.

But the quantities of poverty, of misery, and of crime which show themselves in cities do not alone explain the numerical preponderance of the suicides which occur there. Other causes are at work as well. Mere suffering, mere degradation, do not alone suffice to lead surely to suicide, for there is a depth of ignominy which seems to go below the desire of death. Neither convicts nor prostitutes kill themselves in any appreciable proportions; they seem to grow indifferent to either shame, or fear, or exasperation, and to have acquired the faculty of living on in callous calm under any infamy whatever. But in great towns the conditions

are of a different kind. The preponderance of suicides in them is not exclusively a product of the greater suffering which they contain in comparison with the country, but also, and quite as much, of the lesser disposition to support that suffering. It must be remembered that the inclination to rebellion is almost always greater in thick condensations of people than in sparse communities; that bad examples are more abundant and that good counsels are more rare; that the action of public opinion on each individual is less direct; and that the strange form of solitude which is obtainable nowhere but in crowds is able to exert its peculiarly saddening and enfeebling influence. There is more misery and more despondency, with less encouragement and less restraint. It is from the association of these positive and negative causes, from an increase of the conditions which habitually lead to self-killing, and from a simultaneous diminution of the surroundings which usually deter from it, that the rate of suicide in the richest and most virtuous of large towns is never less than five times higher than in villages, and that in the denser and more immoral capitals it reaches thirty times the average of rural districts. And the working of these leverages is not limited to the towns themselves; it stretches far away across the grass around them, with such marked effect that, in every land, the rate of provincial suicide (which is generally low) increases in almost regular degrees as the capital is approached. The tendency to put an end to life stains out beyond the walls and infects the purer air a hundred miles away.

In addition to these great essential causes, certain other relatively smaller pressures are unceasingly at work augmenting or decreasing the inclination to die. Both age and sex have a good deal to do with it; the spread of education unmistakably develops it; imitation and hereditary propensities are sometimes traceable in it; and though climate does not seem to exercise any effect upon it, the seasons, on the contrary, do most manifestly influence it considerably. Each of these agencies does its own particular work; each of them is worth looking at.

That age does really exert a perceptible action in the matter has been occasionally denied; but all the more recent publications seem to agree that the evidence is conclusive, and that the number of suicides, in proportion to the population, grows steadily, through all the periods of life, from childhood to old age. People go on killing themselves, between nine and ninety, in a constantly increasing progression. The popular theory that we hold more and more to life as we approach its natural conclusion is entirely contradicted by the present statistics of suicide, which show that white hair brings with it, in many cases, a disgust of existence which renders those affected by it too impatient to wait till death comes to them of its own accord. It appears to be considered now that, ratably to the total of individuals of each age, suicides are