Also in Italy, in those districts where crimes against property predominate, suicides are more frequent than in those divisions where crimes of blood are frequent.─Morselli.
Parent Du Chatélet remarks that the suicide rate of prostitutes is very low. Brierre de Boismont estimates the proportion supplied in Paris by registered fallen women as 1-240 of all cases. This author also states, of his series of French cases, that 40 per cent. were persons who led bad moral lives, either drunkards, gamblers, thieves, prostitutes, or persons living in adultery.
The proportion which falls to those who are in health, and lead regular lives, is very small; whilst those who begin life in health, and pander to their vices and appetites, abandon themselves, as statistics definitely show, to a prospect of poverty, disease, and crime; to the prison, the asylum, the hospital, and to a suicide’s grave.
And it is not only open vice that lowers the tone a man may even keep all the conventional rules of morality, and yet fall in this manner, if he neglect and ignore a cheerful acquiescence in those high moral aspirations, which alone make the idea of a self-sought death an evil to which nothing on this side of the grave can compare.
There need not be any difficulty in understanding that lack of moral training, and imperfect and improper education, foster suicide; for it is obvious that men will be more prone to sin, if they have had their consciences weakened by bad advice, loose habits, and the companionship of persons who take a light view of wickedness, and only sneer at self-improvement and goodness.
A system of “laisser aller,” and “don’t care,” are stepping stones to suicide; self-restraint and active efforts after perfection lead one daily farther from it.
Aristotle, in the “Ethics,” Lib. 3, cap. 7, and Plato, in his “Phædo,” remark that “Suicide is committed to avoid evil, and not because it is honourable.”
The suicide judges that the possible evil after death is less than the trouble he has now to bear; hence it is clear enough that the best preventive is to fix on the crime the character of an evil much greater than any that can happen to a man naturally.
Although it has been shewn that the spread of education is followed by an increased amount of self-destruction, yet, if a large number of suicides be analysed, the ratio of one-fifth only are well educated; but then it must be remembered that only a small fraction of the population is educated at all thoroughly. It is the spread of an unsound system of partial education, the tasting of the Pierian spring without drinking deeply, which poisons the mind; mere fragmentary, rudimentary instruction unballasted by the requisite amount of moral and religious teaching. The mere ability to read is, I think, liable to become a great curse unless most carefully used, for it is only too common to find that those who can only read, only read what they had much better have left unread; such as sensational tales, the criminal trials in the daily papers, political squabbles, and narratives of suicides. There could be no stronger prompting influence and determining cause of voluntary death to many an ailing and tempted sufferer than the perusal of such literature.
In “Aurora Floyd” and “Lady Audley’s Secret,” two novels of high standing, suicide is suggested definitely as a remedy for trouble, at least twelve times.