The Birmingham age-herald., 1908-12-13


 TN previous articles pointed out the \ little value placed on life in the Orient | and tried to trace the reasons why human flesh and blood is held so cheap Infanticide, it was shown. was the out growth of the conditions and beliefs that obtain in China Now it remains for us to note that, contrary to more or less generally accepted beliefs at home sui eide, the taking of ones own life, is quite as common in China as the taking of the lives of others.
 Figures on this subject, as on all others, are hard to get here. for China may be described as the land where every thing else Is possible but statistics. It may not be stretching the truth too far to say that this very lack of statistics tends to prove the little value set on human life. At any rate some years ago a missionary whose residence in China had been of long standing reported that there was one suicide to every POGO or 5000 inhabitants, and that it was more common in the cities than In the country Another fact beyond dispute is that per sons of all ages, from the very youngest to the very oldest. do away with them selves.
 The causes for suicide are complex and to understand them one must pierce be- low the surface of Chinese life and Chi nese psychology. Since In so doing one arrives at better understanding of the people themselves and of their institutions, the process cannot be uninteresting or dull
 That which induced Hamlet to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous for tune and gave him pause in making his quietus with a bare bodkin-namely his dread of something after death and his fear of that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns-is consideration that has little if any weight with the oriental The next world in the occidental sense scarcely concerns him; all he wishes to know when he takes his departure from this world is that he will be buried with due ceremony; that he will be laid away in proper sort or coffin and that his posterity will hold his memory in honor, just as he himself has paid reverence to the memory of his ancestors.
 Moreover, to make the next point on which every discerning writer on China insists, the Chinese have not our sen sifiveness to pain and physical suffering. Dotcors in the hospitals and almost any medical missionary whom you chance to interview tell you that Jhinese patients will go through the most painful oper- ations and refuse anesthetics. The least among them will endure without fiinching punishment or torture under which the stoutest of Saxon hearts would quail. We are prone to forget this when we criticise the Chinese for being barbarously cruel to their criminals and prisoners; for pain, like all else. Is a relative quality and what might be unbearable to us might be far from unbearable to some other races.
 The Chinamans lack of sensibility to the suffering he has to endure himself, his lack of sympathy for the suffering of others, which I have dwelt on before, and his religious ideals, which leave him neither baffled by death nor afraid of death, prepare him to face suicide without the fear of its consequences or questions concerning the awful mystery of what may follow.
 It is by no means uncommon in China for one sentenced to death to find by the payment of sufficient sum a substitute who is willing to relieve the condemned man of the rather serious responsibility of dying. When the first railroads were opened in China many of the Celestials laid themselves across its tracks under the protecting cover of the darkness and calmly met death in order that parent or descendants might claim indemnity. So calmly did they do 1t that some of them went quietly to sleep while awaiting the wheels of the engines that were to crush out their lives. This peculiar way of courting fortune by deliberately losing ones life became such a source of expense and trouble to at least one of the rail- roads that 1t was obliged to run its cars at night at slow speed, their way lighted by powerful headlights.
 Nor Is this readiness to hurl one's self into the abyss of the beyond and the un- known confined to those of the male sex by any means: on the contrary, suicide IS more common among Chinese women than among men. It is the reverse with us at home, the nature of our women, more sensitive and finer though 1t be.