Nuns, convent maids, and lay sisters, all numerous classes in Italy, give very few suicides.
In the higher walks of education the rates are all higher. Men of science, doctors, lawyers, military men, and the governing officials, all are very prone to self-destruction.
In those counties of France where there is the greatest attention paid to trade, agriculture, and commerce, the suicide rate is the highest; in counties where the development of business is slight the rate is lower.
And, further, it is almost universally true that the states that have most perfect railway systems are those which have the largest average of suicide.
Now, all countries having a largely developed trade are liable to commercial depressions; these are constantly followed by waves of increased lunacy and more numerous suicides; and note that these effects follow not immediately on a crisis, but after a little interval.
At the crisis the majority of minds are strung up to the needed effort: it is the loosening of the tension that upsets the mental equilibrium; the exhaustion following prolonged exertion. Similar to these commercial waves are the effects of war, increased prices and taxation; it was not the bad years of the Crimean War that gave the heaviest voluntary death rate, but the two years after.
In Austria the war of 1858-9 was effectual in the increased rates of 1860-61.
In France suicides and lunatics were more numerous in 1872 and 1873, not in the years of the war, 1870 and 1871.
Legoyt gives the following analysis of suicides: Middle classes and outcasts, 596 per million; liberal professions, 218; industrial classes, 128; tillers of the soil, 90 per million.
I subjoin a Table, borrowed from Lisle, shewing the employment in more than 50,000 cases of suicide in France.