“Mr. Haldane is going, but I remain here.”
A look of relief passed over the vicar’s face.
“And what is the subject of your paper, if curiosity be pardonable?” he asked.
“Oh, it is a chapter from the great opus on morals. I call it ‘The Problem of Suicide.’ A singularly fascinating subject to one who has paid any attention to it, I assure you. Does it happen to have fallen in your line of study?”
“I cannot say it has.”
“You would find some curious generalizations here, in that case,” said Mr. Haldane, pointing to the sheets of paper on his desk. “For instance, I suppose you would be hardly prepared to grant that suicide, which seems a barbarous and unenlightened act, is really an effect of civilization, or that an act which appears more than any other an evidence of individual spontaneity, is in fact the inevitable issue of universal and absolute social law.”
“I am certainly not prepared to concede that.”
“No; few persons unacquainted with the subject would be. Still, the facts remain. The suicide who imagines he is rebelling against all law and asserting his individual independence, is but illustrating the coercion of the physical and psychical dispensation. Why, you shall not even choose your own weapon of destruction, or select the spot in which you shall die. Law will fix those apparently trivial details for you. If your suicide is an Englishman, for example, he will prefer hanging to cutting and stabbing, cutting and stabbing to drowning, drowning to poison, and poison to firearms. With English women the order of preference is modified. A third of the women, and hardly a seventh of the men, seek death by drowning; while a seventh of the women poison themselves, but only a fifteenth of the men. The ratios hold good from year to year—relatively at least—for suicide is largely on the increase. You should look into the matter for yourself. It is a most attractive social problem.”
“Perhaps Mr. Santley would like to look at your paper?” suggested Mrs. Haldane.
“You shall be very welcome to see it when I return,” said the philosopher.