hat,
after the period of childhood, the tendency to suicide increases
steadily with advancing age. In France, for example, if the population
be segregated in groups comprising all persons ten to twenty years of
age, all persons twenty to thirty years of age, all persons thirty to
forty years of age, and so on, by decades, the annual number of suicides
per million rises as follows: first group 56, second group 130, third
155, fourth 204, fifth 217, sixth 274, seventh 317, and the rate finally
reaches its maximum in the group that comprises persons more than eighty
years of age.

In the United States, the rate increases from 128 per million, in the
age group comprising persons under forty-five, to 300 per million in the
age group comprising persons over sixty-five. The figures vary in
different countries, according to the hereditary national suicide
tendencies; but the steady increase with advancing age is common to all.
These statistics would seem to support the pessimistic philosophy of
Schopenhauer, and to prove that the longer one lives the less one wants
to live; but it must not be forgotten that the suicide rate is a measure
of exceptional unhappiness, not of the general welfare.

In the suicidal tendencies of the sexes there is, as might be expected,
a very great difference. In all countries and in all parts of the world,
suicides among women are far less frequent than among men. The ratio
varies from one to two to two to five. This difference is generally
attributed to the supposed fact that women are sheltered and protected
by men, as well as by their domestic environment, and that,
consequently, they suffer less from the wear and tear of life; but I
doubt very much the adequacy of this explanation. The life of women, in
the world at large, is quite as hard as that of men, and often harder.
In the higher and wealthier classes of society women may be, and
doubtless are, sheltered and protected; but in the poorer classes they
take their full share of the suffering, even if they do not bear the
brunt of the struggle.

The hundreds of Russian women who between 1877 and 1885 were exiled to
eastern Siberia for political offenses had no shelter or protection
whatever, and must necessarily have suffered more than the exiled men
from the hardships and privations of banishment; and yet, I am quite
sure that I understate the fact when I say that the number of suicides
among the men was at least five times greater than it