we know, with an approximation to
certainty, that there is a suicide every six minutes and a half in
Europe and the United States alone. Suicide has cost France 274,000
lives since 1871, Germany 158,000 since 1893, and the United States
120,000 since 1890. I need hardly point out the practical importance of
the questions that present themselves in connection with this abnormal
and apparently unnecessary waste of human life. Among such questions
are: Upon what general and world-wide conditions does suicide depend?
Are any of its causes removable? What are the reasons for the steady and
progressive increase of self-destruction in civilized countries? Is
suicide controlled or affected by any natural laws, and, if so, by what
laws? These are all questions of practical importance, because upon the
answers to them depends the possibility of economizing human life and
increasing the sum total of human happiness. But the subject is one of
deep interest, entirely apart from its practical importance.

_Psychological Problems of Suicide_

In some of its aspects, suicide raises psychological questions which
bristle with difficulties, but which, nevertheless, pique the curiosity
and demand explanatory answers. Why, for example, is the rate of suicide
strictly dependent everywhere upon season and weather? Why is the
tendency to self-destruction lessened by war? What is the explanation of
suicide in the face of impending death, when there is still a fair
chance of escape, or when the natural death that is threatened would
involve less suffering than the act of self-destruction? What is the
mental state of the hundreds of persons who kill themselves every year
upon what would seem to be absurdly inadequate provocation--of the man,
for example, who commits suicide because his wife declines to get out
his clean underclothes, or the woman who takes poison because she has
received a comic valentine? In its religious aspect, why is the tendency
to suicide greatest among Protestant Christians and least among
Mohammedans and Jews? In its racial aspect, why is the suicide rate of
Japan eight times that of Portugal, and the rate of American whites
eight or ten times that of full-blooded American blacks? Why do the
Slavs of Bohemia kill themselves at the rate of 158 per million, while
the Slavs of Russia commit suicide at the rate of only 31 per million?
Why do emigrants, going to a new country, carry their national suicide
rates with them, a