Watertown republican. [volume] (Watertown, Wis.) 1860-1906, 1873-06-18

70 MY, Wnen women are generally settled
IN life, while the craze of business is at its
height with men, the women suicides are
only 43 while the men suicides rise to 239.
As they grow older, women, who naturally
tend to survive men, continually increase
in tenacity of life, while the relative num-
Der Of male suicides regularly increases,
t nn approaching on1 SEVENTY mae wnen
men make way with themselves nearly
| the average of all ages, while the women
only take their lives at the rate of 8 in
| 100, 000 At ninety, when there are only
| sc poor veterans left of 100000, five men
suicides can still be found, but not one
| woman, though at that age the female sex
is in the majority.
The sex Of the suicides and the season
of the year in which the deed is commit
ted have a great deal to do with the lethal
means to which the suicide resorts in
order to shuttle off the mortal coil with
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 concerns. In the agricultural
districts the rope is the favorite; in cities
poison, the rope, the razor, and the tide
enjoy divided suffrages. Altogether hang
ing is the favorite method of .f6lo de &C.
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 his
action, no matter how much he may be
take poison, while only very small pro-
portion of them-3S in 265-shoot them
selves or cut their Threats. They are
afraid of blood, and besides there is an
uncomeliness about disfguring wounds
and an essential dirtiness and coarseness
in blood at which they instinctively re-
volt It was subtle remark of Hawthorne
that had Zenobia, in "Blithedale," guessed
how ugly she looked as corpse she
would never have drowned herself It is
the nature of a woman to shrink from the
unseemly, 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 a satire upon the
super1uous 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
60 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 in sum-
mer as in winter, but poison keeps up a
pretty steady average, except I'D 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 times
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 1916 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 tllan 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
100000, 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 q much larger than the proper
tionate share falls to the Germans. Thus
Germany has 1,690,41O natives in this
country to 1,955,027 natives of Ireland
But there were 246 suicides Of German
birth to only 104 of Irish birth, showing
proportion of very nearly to l. The
French fiction of the Englishman's pro-
clivity to suicide is not borne out by these
tables. On the contrary, while 55O,6SS
persons English born produced AZ suicides
or 1 in $4,000, 1920 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 Gun
known" nationality will have practically
disappeared. In that event. and having
such copious and accurate data, it will not
need Quetelet 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. WorZd