Mineral Point tribune. (Mineral Point, Wis.) 1869-1938, 1873-06-05
NUMBER %.

means to which the suicide resorts in
happy despatch. The section of the coun-
try has also something to do with the
choice of weapons In the wilder regions
of the West, where firearms are plenty and
drug stores infrequent, pistol or rifle
shot is the usual means employed by
both men and women in settling up their
temporal concern !. In the agricultural
districts the rope is the tavorite; in cities
poison, the rope, the razor, and the tide
enioy divided suffrages. Altogether hang
ING is the favorite method OF teto de sc.
This is on account of its favoring privacy,
noiselessness. and not making dirt. Be
sides. when a rope is holding one up by
the neck with his toes out of reach OF the
ground he cannot usually reconsider MS
action, no matter how much he may De
minded to do so. The majority OF women
take poison, while only very small pro-
portion of them-3S in 2S5-shoot them
selves or cut their throats. They are
afraid of blood, and besides there is an
uncomeliness about distiguring wounds
and an essential dirtiness and coarsenesS
in blood at which they lnstlncuvely re
volt 1t was subtle remark of Hawthorne
that had Zenobia, in "Blithedale," guessed
how ugly she looked as corpse she
would never have drowned herself 1t is
the nature of woman to shrink from the
unseemlv, and when she cuts her throat
she invariably does so over basin, To
keep from spelling the carpets and dab
bling her clothes.
1t might be taken for satire upon the
superfluous humaneness of our laws that,
while only 81 persons were strangled IN
| 1870 by the hangman's rope, $40 hanged
themselves with their own ropes. In spite
of Ophelia's fate, the love maniacs hang
rather than drown themselves, nor do they
90 much more frequently to the rivers IN
May and June and July, when the water
| is inviting enough to wash despair away,
| than in December and November Fire
arms are not near so much used III sum-
mer as in winter, but poison keeps up
pretty steady average, except in May,when
| heartbroken girls fly to Paris green and
! the laudanum bottle, and do more eXecu-
| ton in that way than the men. In fact
| men do not like to poison themselves, and
while the deaths of men from gun-shot
| wounds are sixteen times as many as those
| of women, from the razor over four tunes
| as many as those of women, and from the
rope nearly five times, from poison there
| are very few more men die than women.
| In an aggregate of 1,345 suicides there
are only IS of colored persons and In
| dian Nothing could better prove the
| contented disposition and happy tempera-
ment of our colored brother than this re-
| markable fact, that while the white man
takes his life at the rate of in 100000, the
| negro only does so at the rate OF IN
| ,0O0,0 900, or in other words tie white man
| commits 10 suicides in proportion to the
| negro's 1. The proportion of suicides
among our citizens of foreign birth is rela-
| lively greater than that among natives, and
| of these a much larger than the proper
tionate share falls to the Germans. lhus
| Germany has 690,41 natives in this
country to 1,S55,S27 natives of Ireland.
But there were 246 suicides of German
| birth to only 1O4 of Irish birth, showing a
! proportion Of very nearly to l. The
| French fiction of the Englishman's pro-
| clvity to suicide is not borne out by these
| tables. On the contrary, while 55o,6SS
persons English born produced AZ suicides
or in $4,000, 116,240 persons French
| born produced 10 suicides, or in 5000.
| If the taking of the census improves IN
accuracy as it has done heretofore, we
may hope that in 1880 the class of mot
specified" means of suicide and of "un-
| known" nationality will have practically
disappeared. In that event, and having
| such copious and accurate data, it will not
need Queteet to derive from our
| statistics of suicide, in comparison with
| those of other nations, the means towards
| the solution of some of the most important
| social problems and biological questions
that are now stumbling blocks in the way
| of political development.-N. 7. WorM.