of this by contrasting love as presented in the sexes. As there is no process of vivisection or array of physical facts which will prove this, we must study this emotion as we know it to exist in the mass of men and women, and which has been verified by common experience. But, in the first place, we must bear in mind the widely-diverging paths in life followed by men and women. Men enter the world and labor bodily or mentally, and thus expend all surplus energy. This energy is used at the direct expense of the emotional life. Women, as a rule, do not have this vicarious outlet for the emotions. Love with women exists as an entity, with men as an abstraction. A study of tables of suicidal deaths in both sexes gives us some startling evidence of the difference in both the intensity and effect of this emotion in men and women. The decade between twenty-five and thirty-five years of age affords the largest number of voluntary deaths for women. It is during this period of woman's life that the demand for love is greatest. The functional life is exerting its most potent sway over mind and body. Thus it is that to love and to be loved is a physiological demand during this period, and it becomes evident that this excess of suicides is the outcome partly of a defeated sexual life. The figures for men present a remarkable contrast. The same period in the life of men is also the period of greatest sexual activity. But, whatever vicissitudes the emotion of love among men may be subjected to, it does not find expression in self-destruction. On the contrary, the period of greatest liability to suicides is postponed to the period when the sexual energies have expended their youthful ardor, so that the decade between thirty-five and forty-five years of age gives the greatest number of suicidal deaths, and during which interval it is that the business or worldly interest of men attains success, or ends in failure.
Another fact derived from the same source throws light on this interesting subject. The condition of concubinage almost trebles the number of voluntary deaths for women. It seems reasonable, from what we know of human beings, to assert that it is not the continuance, but the breaking up of these relations—which, in a monogamous state of society, must invariably occur—that leads to this result. We have here almost positive proof that this tendency to self-destruction in the relation of women to the other sex finds its factor in a defeated sexual feeling or love. It is generally understood that the mental and bodily structure and function of women develop at an earlier age than in the other sex. Now, there are twice as many suicides among girls as among boys under the fifteenth year. A leading character of the earlier development of women over the other sex is a sexual one—a capacity to love and to be loved. It is a very significant fact in comparing the degree and quality of love as we find it existing in men and women, that the two periods in woman's life in which suicidal deaths exceed those in the male are at the time of structural completion and greatest functional activity. This demonstrates the predominance of
