The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1841-12-10 00:00:00

OUR VORTFOLIO.=-No. XI

Self:destruction is said to be the crime of old comm nn

and to be rare in, new states

well-founded ; it would seem to be consistent ;via

know of the act. In new communities the spirit o
prise is awake—hope is young, and disappointment

. ,
ships, and trials of great severity, fail to subdue the elasti
nerve, because there is yet beyond all, a " hope" that bette
times will come. In the advanced stages of society, th
ground has been all surveyed—the depths and shallows c
life have been sounded—men know better what they have t
expect, and when the plans and arrangements by which the
had calculated on the attainment of certain ends of happines:

break down without results,—there is no yet lingering spar
to reanimate their drooping spirits—the world becomes
void to their imagination, and they hasten to relieve then-

selves from the dreary consciousness of hopeless misery; b
self-destruction.

There dawns not a morning of the three hundred and
sixty-five days of our year, in which the functionary ap-
pointed to take charge of such matters, in London and Paris,
may not, if he should give himself the trouble to think on the
subject, feel the most peifect assurance, as he rises out or
bed, that there is work provided for him in his line of busi
ness for that day. Vice and misery are his unfailing cater
ers ; and it is probable that accustomed to the raga

ility of

suicide in every conceivable form, this worthy persona
• - •• - • - -

enters upon the daily labours of his vocation, with the least
possible amount of disturbance from any sensitive or senti-
mental causes. A very short course of experience in his
office, most likely, sufficed to present him with a recurrence
of the same agencies ending in similar results. Here the
lifeless corse of a once fair and lovely being dragged from the
river, and laved in the dead-house, awaits his inspection, and
the examination of evidence. It is a sad sight, and the story
is a lamentable one ; but your Coroner is well versed in these
affairs, and seems all up in a few words, as thus—love, se-
duction, a career of infamy, destitution, suicide. He has no
time for further particulars ; there is another corse lying for
him in another part of the town, and he must not keep gen-
tlemen waiting ; so away he goes. And here there is a dif-
ferent form of that quietus which the impatient of injury,
calamity, or suffering procure for themselves ; here a gentle-
man in a well-furnished house, with no apparent want of
friends or comforts, and a man of good repute in the world,
has terminated his existence by a pistol shot, and great is
the wonder—loud the lamentation of relatives and anxious
inquirers ; but again, your man of business is on the wing,
there he perceives that, however fair things might have
looked on the outside, there was a certain derangement of
affairs within that dreaded disclosure, and portended bank-
ruptcy—that the picture was appalling to one who had been
long accustomed to a certain degree of consideration in so-
ciety, and that to escape its realities, he had merely taken
that irrevocable steps which thousands have rashly done
before. Your inquisitor of self-destroyers must again be
moving; the gaming table, penury, crimes of various kinds,
remorse, bodily anguish, blighted hopes,—
" The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
• The pangs of despised love, the law's delay"—
and many other heart-stinging incidents have provided more
subjects for him ; so he just briefly jots down each case, and
by a prudent economy of time, speech, and sensibility, gets
through his work.

" Englishmen in November" did for a long space enjoy
unenviable distinction in this ungracious mode of making
their exit from sublunary affairs; but late statistics of crime
prove that they no longer possess a monopoly in this re-
spect. It now appears that the suicidal mania is quite as
common among our lively neighbours the French, as it is
among ourselves, and if we were to travel to other old states,
we dare say it would he ascertained that this great act of re-
bellion against the Most High, is by no means monopolised
by either.

The tendency of states as they advance in years and com-
plexity of internal relation, is to corruption ; they rise and
fall, flourish and decay—and have their epochs as the life of
an individual. This crime increases as others do in the
crowded city—in a high degree of luxury and refinement, lust
for the reason that the temptations which lead to it are more
common in such circumstances. It will, of course, be more
rare in the earlier stages or society, or in a new state—such
as the North American republic—where the field of ertter-
prize is still wide, and where, as we have said, scarcely any re-
verse of fortune, leaves a man entirely hopeless. It onlyre-
mains to inquire how it continues to prevail, as if the opinion
of society had undergone no change, since it was regarded,
at least by soine, as a virtue rather than a necessity. " Self-
murder," says our excellent Blackstone, " the pretended
heroism, but real cowardice of the stoic philosophers, who
destroyed themselves to avoid those ills which they had not
the fortitude to endure, though the attempting it seems to be
countenanced by the civil law,* yet was punished by the
Athenian law with cutting off the band which' committed the
desperate_ deed. And also the laws of England wisely and
religiously consider, that no man bath a power to destroy
life, but by commission from God, the author of it : and, as
the suicide is guilty of a double offence; one spiritual, in in-
vading the prerogative of the Almighty, and rushing into his
immediate presence uncalled for; the other temporal, against
the king, who hath an interest in the preservation of all his
subjects—the law has therefore ranked this among the highest
crimes—attaching to it the penalty of an ignominious burial
in the highway, with a forfeiture to the king of all the
suicide's goods and chattels. The party must be of years of
discretion, and in his senses, else it is no crime. But this
excuse ought not to be strained to that length to which our
coroner's juries are apt to carry it, viz., that the very act of
suicide is an evidence of insanity; as if every man who acts
contrary to reason, has no reason at all : for the same argu-
ment would prove every other criminal non compos, as well
as the self-murderer." Our laws then give their support to
the divine canon against self-slaughter, but whether in the
manner wisely—is a point concerning which we may reason-
ably entertain somedoubt. Certain it is, that the coroner's
inquest now does rarely any more than ascertain the cause
and manner of the death, without giving to it that descrip-
tion which would involve those penalties which the law at-
taches to thefe/o de se. Juries are induced to stretch their
consciences rather than be instrumental in giving efficacy to
a statute which inflicts its :punishment on surviving friends
and relatives—that is to say, upon the innocent rather than
the guilty—whom, indeed, it cannot reach. The statute
could only have been intended to operate as a terror to the
meditators of the crime • but if the statute be rarely or never
enforced, that terror, whatever it might have amounted to at
any period, must have ceased altogether, and the law become
a dead letter. We would not say that human laws may not,
in some few instances, have an effect in checking the impi-
ous intent ; we can conceive a man with little fear of God
before his eyes, who might be deterred from laying violent
hands on himself, solely by regard to that loss of property
which he would entail upon his family by the deed ; but such
cases have ever been, and will probably continue to be, ex-
ceedingly rare compared with the great mass in which hu-
man laws must be wholly inefficacious. The man who makes
up his mind to destroy himself, must, generally speaking,
have but small regard to any consequences that may follow
in this life, after he has ceased to be. There can be no effec-
tual terror against this madness, but that of an eventual
reckoning at the dread tribunal of an angry God. Else, as
our inimitable bard has argued—

" Who would fardels bear
To groan and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death—
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns—puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of ?"

That Christianity has done much to mitigate this, as well as
innumerable other evils in the world, there cannot be the
smallest doubt; and we can only say that it would be miich
more efficacious if its principles were more widely diffused.
Of all the systems ever proposed to mankind—not to speak
profanely—it is that which peculiarly and above all others
offers balm to hurt minds, and teaches the way to heaven
through patient suffering, and consequently presents at once
the only true antidote to that poison which lurks insidiously
in the veins, and ferments in the mind when calamities be-
come suggestive of suicide. It is the genuine elixir vitce for
old as well as new communities, and happily sets at nought,
as an element with which the world is as yet hut imperfectly
acquainted, all old calculations upon the decrepitude or de-
cadence of kingdoms.

* Si quis impatientia doloris, aut twdio vitae, aut morbo,
aut furore, ant pudore, mod maluit, non animadvertavit in
eum.—Pf. 49. 16. 6.