"Yes, I'm coming," Dosia called back. "There's nothing the matter!" She had run from the room without looking up at that figure beside her, snatching a glass of water automatically from the dining-table as she passed by it. Fast as her feet might carry her, they could not keep pace with her beating heart.
When the telephone-bell rang a moment after, it was to confirm the tidings given before. Justin was in Chicago.
TO BE CONCLUDED
THE PROBLEMS OF SUICIDE
BY GEORGE KENNAN
Few branches of sociological investigation have more practical importance, or present a greater number of problems, difficulties, and interesting speculative questions, than the branch that deals with the complex, varied, and often inexplicable phenomena of suicide. When we consider the fact that more than ten thousand persons take their own lives in the United States every year, that more than seventy thousand die annually by their own hands in Europe, and that the suicide rate is constantly and rapidly increasing throughout the greater part of the civilized world, we are forced to admit that, from the view-point of vital economy at least, the subject is one of the utmost gravity. In 1881 the annual suicide rate of the United States was only 12 per million of the population, and our total number of suicides was only 605; last year our suicide rate had risen to 126 per million, and our suicides numbered 10,782. If the present rate of increase be maintained, we shall lose by suicide, in the next five years, nearly as many lives as were lost by the Union armies in battle in the five years of the Civil War. We are already losing annually from this cause more men than were killed on the Union side in the three great battles of Gettysburg, Spottsylvania, and the Wilderness taken together.
Statisticians have estimated that, in the world as a whole, there is a suicide every three minutes, and 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.