ian peasant to get
either poison or a pistol; but all the police in the empire cannot
prevent him from drowning himself in a pond, or hanging himself in his
own barn.

A careful comparison of all the facts accessible seems to show that in
Europe, at least, suicide bears a certain definite relation to education
and manufactures; and that, as I have already said, it is a by-product
of the great, complicated world-machine that we call modern
civilization. Its specific causes, so far as they can be ascertained,
are, on the educational side, the development of increased nervous and
psychic sensibility, which makes men feel more acutely all wants,
deprivations, misfortunes, and sufferings; and, on the manufacturing
side, a monotony of employment which wearies and exhausts the body while
it gives little exercise to the educated mind and leaves the latter free
to brood over its unsatisfied longings and desires, as well as its many
trials and disappointments. There are other causes, such as the growing
disproportion between wants generally and the means of gratification
generally; alcoholism; unhealthful work, especially in manufacturing
districts; barrack and tenement-house life; and all the evils incident
to poverty, overcrowding, and bad sanitary conditions in cities. So far
as I can see, these causes, at present, are not removable. Education
must continue to intensify sensibility and increase the number of men's
wants, and the great economic machine must grind on, even though it
crush thousands of human beings, every year, in the cogs of its
innumerable wheels. A high suicide rate is part of the price that we pay
for the educational and material achievements upon which we pride
ourselves. We have greatly multiplied the means of human happiness, but
whether, on the whole, we have increased the sum total of human
happiness is perhaps an open question. In any event, the high and
rapidly increasing suicide rate shows that we are pushing the weaklings
to the wall.

The question of what can be done to lessen the suicide tendency and
check this great waste of human power and energy brings me to the only
important cause of self-destruction which seems to me removable, and
that is newspaper publicity. No argument is needed to prove that man is
essentially an imitative animal. In dress, in behavior, in speech, in
modes of thought, and in social conventions, we are all prone to do what
we see others do; and when unhappy men and women