Curiosities of Suicide. to be entirely sane, to slaughter his whole family—a wife and six children, one of them a well-grown lad—to do this out of affection, and with the most anxious avoidance of any pain or violence, and then with his victims just dead, to write letter after letter explain ing his motives and means, to draft a sensible will, to pass out among his friends in order to secure witnesses to the document, and then return to the charnel-house and execute him self—this might have interested Don Quix ote. Yet this is what a druggist's assistant did. Owing to various pecuniary troubles, he could not bear to desert his wife and chil dren, and decided that the whole family should die together. He explained his plan to the whole family should go away to the next world together. He explained his plan to his wife, a noble-hearted woman, he says, who did not wish to survive him and she agreed to it, provided only that all should go at once as an undivided household. He therefore mixed some prussic acid with half a pound of treacle, and gave the first dose to his wife in bed with her two younger chil dren. She took it, he says, quite consciously, and as easily "as if it had been beer or tea," or, as he again says, "like a lamb." All died easily, he wrote, and without pain, and then the father wrote four letters, drew up a will, and then went out to have his signature wit
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nessed. Returning, he lay on the sofa and swallowed the poison. France holds the record for suicides. In Prussia, again, a very large number of per sons seem to be tired of a world afflicted with pessimism and compulsory military service. In Austria, the number of suicides is nearly double that of England, but both Italy and Russia are lower on the list. The increase in most European countries has been consider able during the last eight years, but in France it has been enormous. The total for the past twelve months is seven thousand five hun dred and seventy-two, one-fifth of these being in and around Paris. It is remarkable that poverty has only caused four hundred and eighty-three suicides in all France, and the figure includes a morbid fear of impending misery without actual privation; one thou sand nine hundred and . seventy-five cases may be traced to mental aberration, and one thousand two hundred and twenty-eight to physical suffering. Among the moral causes domestic troubles stand first, and alcoholism next. There are two hundred cases of dis appointed love, and only twenty-seven from jealousy, dislike of military service giving twenty-five. What is suicide? The medical department of one American insurance company defines it as the result of disease or bodily infirmity.
