VI. Asiatics
| In Japan (1905) | 209 |
It is difficult to assign definite or satisfactory reasons for the wide differences shown in the above table. Skelton has suggested that the low suicide rates of certain countries are due to emigration, "which provides an outlet for a great deal of misery and constitutes a hopeful alternative to suicide"; but this conjecture, although ingenious, is hardly supported by the facts. It might perhaps explain the low suicide rates of Italy and Ireland, but it does not account for the equally low suicide rate of the Russian peasants, who emigrate hardly at all, nor for the extremely high suicide rate of the Germans, who emigrate in large numbers. Neither does it throw any light upon the persistence of national suicide rates long after emigration. The generalization that seems to harmonize and explain the greatest number of facts is that suicide is most prevalent in countries where education goes hand in hand with highly developed manufacturing industry. In Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Russia the people have little education, manufacturing industries are feebly developed, and the suicide rate is low. In Saxony the percentage of illiteracy is very small, more than half of the population work in factories, and the suicide rate is the highest in Europe. I do not dare to assert that even this rude generalization is warranted by the facts; but, if it were sustained, it would seem to show that suicide is a by-product of the great, complicated machine that we call modern civilization.
Whatever may be the reasons for differences in national suicide rates, and whatever may be the causes that have produced them, there is little doubt, I think, that the rates themselves are true manifestations of national character, and that they are as permanent as the character of which they are an outcome. When, therefore, a people migrates from one place to another, it takes both its character and its suicide rate to the new location. This is clearly apparent in the vital statistics of immigrants who come from various parts of Europe to the United States. Such immigrants, as a rule, prosper here and become happier here, but the increased prosperity and happiness do not greatly affect the suicidal tendencies that they had when they were poor and wretched in their original homes. Even their descendants, born in America, keep substantially unchanged the suicide rates that they have inherited, with their character, from their European ancestors. The Germans who came here forty or fifty years ago brought a high suicide rate with them, and their descendants maintain it. The Irish, on the contrary, brought a low suicide rate to this country, and their children have it still. In the following table will be found the suicide rates of a few nationalities in Europe and of their descendants in the United States.[22]