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 learn, from the newspapers, that scores of other unhappy people are daily escaping from their troubles through the always open door of suicide, when familiarity with the idea of self-destruction deprives the act of all its natural terror, it is not at all surprising that they yield to what seems to be the general current of their social environment. I have, in my own collection of material, a surprisingly large number of cases in which the suicidal act may be traced directly to newspaper publicity and imitation; but I must limit myself to a single striking illustration—the suicidal epidemic in Emporia, Kansas, in the summer of 1901. As a result, apparently, of the publication of the details of two or three suicides of people prominent in that little Kansas town, there broke out an epidemic of self-destruction which culminated in the sunny, flowery month of June, and which carried the annual suicide rate from about 90 per million to 1,665 per million—a rate five times greater than that of Saxony. Mr. Morse, the mayor of the city, consulted the Board of Health, and decided to stop the publication of the details of suicides in the local papers, even if it should require the employment of force. He issued a proclamation, on the 16th of June, in which he said: "I have consulted the Board of Health, and if the Emporia papers do not comply with my request, I shall have a right to stop, and I will stop summarily, the publication of these suicide details, under the law providing for the suppression of epidemics. There is clearly an epidemic in this city, and although it is mental, it is none the less deadly. Its contagion may be clearly shown to come from what is known in medicine as the psychic suggestion, found in the publication of the details of suicides. If the paper on which the local journals are printed had been kept in a place infected with small-pox, I could demand that the journals stop using that paper, or stop publication. If they spread another contagion—the contagious suggestion of suicide—I believe the liberty of the press is not to be considered before the public welfare, and that the courts would sustain me in using force to prevent the publication of newspapers containing matter clearly deleterious to the public health."
I believe that the reasoning of Mayor Morse is perfectly sound, and that the position taken by him is absolutely impregnable. The prevention of the publication of suicides in the newspapers of a State would require a special legislative act, but it would probably do more to lessen the suicidal tendency than any other single measure that could be taken. In the winter of 1902, Representative Jenkins introduced in the National House of Representatives a bill making periodicals containing details of suicides unmailable; but I think it was never reported from committee.
The Emotional Temperament as a Cause
There is one other way in which the suicide rate may possibly be lowered, or at least held in check, and that is through the cultivation of what may be called the heroic spirit. We are becoming too emotional and sentimental, and too much inclined to regard weakness with sympathy, instead of with the contempt that it generally deserves. In the language of the prize ring, the pugilist who lies down while he can yet stand and see is called a "quitter." It would be harsh and unjust to apply to all
suicides this opprobrious name; but there can be little doubt, I think, that the majority of them are weaklings who give up and lie down while they still have a fighting chance.
Readers of shipping news may still remember the wreck of a German kerosene steamer on the wildest, most precipitous part of the coast of Newfoundland, in February, 1901. The steamer took fire during a heavy winter gale, and the captain ran her ashore, at the nearest point of land, with the hope of saving the lives of the crew. She struck on a submerged reef in a little cove, about an eighth of a mile from a coast which was three or four hundred feet high and as precipitous as a wall. When she was first seen by a few fishermen at daylight, her boats were gone, and all of her crew had apparently perished except three men. Two were standing on the bridge, and one was lashed aloft in the fore-rigging. About ten o'clock in the forenoon a tremendous sea carried away the bridge and the two men on it, and they were seen no more. At three o'clock in the afternoon the solitary survivor,—the man in the fore-rigging,—who was evidently suffering intensely from hunger and cold, unlashed himself, threshed his arms against his body for five minutes to restore the circulation in them, and then took off his coat, waved his hand to the fishermen on top of the cliff, climbed down the shrouds, and plunged into the sea—but not to commit suicide. He swam to the shore, made three attempts in different places to get a footing among the rocks at the base of the cliff, but was swept away every time by the surf, and finally abandoned the attempt as hopeless. At that crisis in the struggle ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have given up and allowed themselves to drown; but this man was not a "quitter." He turned his face again seaward, struck out for the half-submerged ship, and after a long and desperate struggle succeeded in reaching her and getting on board. He climbed the fore-shrouds, waved his hand to the pitying but powerless fishermen on the edge of the cliff, and lashed himself again in the rigging. At intervals, until dark, he made signals to the fishermen to show that he was yet alive. At daybreak on the following morning he could still be seen in the fore-rigging, but his head had fallen on his breast and he was motionless. He had frozen to death in the night. That man died, as a man in adverse circumstances ought to die, fighting to the last. You may call it foolish, and say that he might better have ended his sufferings by allowing himself to drown when he found that he could not make a landing at the base of the cliff; but deep down in your hearts you pay secret homage to his courage, his endurance, and his indomitable will. He was defeated at last, but, so long as he had consciousness, neither fire nor cold nor tempest could break down his manhood.
The Caucasian mountaineers have a proverb which says: "Heroism is endurance for one moment more." That proverb recognizes the fact that in this world the human spirit, with its dominating force, the will, may be and ought to be superior to all bodily sensations and all accidents of environment. We should not only feel, but we should teach, by our conversation and by our literature, that, in the struggle of life, it is essentially a noble thing and a heroic thing to die fighting. In a recent psychological story called "My Friend Will," Charles F. Lummis pays a striking tribute to the power of the human mind over the accidents of life and chance when he makes his "friend Will" say: "I am bigger than anything that can happen to me. All these things—sorrow, misfortune, and suffering—are outside my door. I'm in the house and I've got the key!"