THISTLEDOWN.

Te Aroha News, Volume XI, Issue 1709, 26 January 1895, Page 2

THISTLEDOWN.

“ A man may jest and toll tho truth.” —Horace.

One of the most prominent features of civilisation nineteen centuries after Christ is the increasing number of suicides. Since the late Mr Justice Gillies’ dictum that it was absurd to treat failure to till oneself as a crime, when success would remove the criminal beyond the reach of the law, the attempt has been rarely punished, and we can rarely take up the paper now without reading of some chit of a girl swallowing matehheads in a fit of temper; some mother hanging or drowning herself; or some man cutting his carotic artery instead of his beard. It would have been just as logical to argue that it is absurd to punish a man for' attempting to break gaol, because if you didn’t recapture him you could not punish him; and, pushed to extremes, the same- doctrine would, go far to justify a burglar or garotter in shooting any one who opposed-him. For by shooting him dead the criminal would escape justice, and ought therefore to escape if by just missing murder he he caught. I have seen no statistics as to the proportion of suicides in the colonies, but I should he surprised to learn that they were any better than those of Connecticut, to be on the safe side. In the ratio of suicides to the total population, Saxony heads the list with 388 per million; Denmark has 260 ; Franco 150 ; Russia 134 ; Connecticut 103, as compared with under 70 in England. In Pagan times, though Socrates taught that man in this life was placed by God like’a sentinel at his post, which it was cowardice to abandon without his commander’s permission, yet the prevalent drift of learned opinion was the reverse. The Stoics, who represented the high-water-mark of Pagan morality, while theoretically holding the same belief, practically denied it, for they taught that each man was sole judge in his own case, and if on a careful survey of all his circumstances he found the evil overbalancing the good, he should look on this as a plain order from God to quit this life. Christianity taught, on the contrary, that suicide is in all cases self-murder, and never justifiable homicide, and all Christian legislation has treated it as such. We have now, however, as it seems, relapsed into worse than the Pagan state. We read of little girls of 7or 8 hanging themselves for a scolding or a slap from their mothers. I would here suggest a few of the probable reasons for this decline in morality. •» ■»

The first is a decay in the practical belief in a future life; the second the monotony of this present life; the third, its feverish competition. It cannot be denied that in addition to the increasing numbers who deny a future life, among these who still profess to believe the belief is of a different nature from what we call belief in the affairs of this world. As regards’this world, j belief is a compound product of the intellect and the will governing us with the force of law. I believe a match will flight my pipe or hura my fingers, I use it for one purpose and try to avoid abusing it for the other. Our belief in heaven or hell, cn the contrary. is in the majority of cases but an, assent at best io an intellectual proposition,' often a mere indolent indisposition to dis- ! pute it. i

The second and third c auses I have suggested may seem self-contradictory till we consider that competition is for the means of life, the monotony in the life itself. In new lands there is one element of monotony we must never forget in such statistics as we are dealing with, and that is solitude. In our gaols absolutely solitary confinement has been found impossible, except for brief periods at a time, it almost invariably ends in madness. We cannot -then bo surprised at an increased average of suicide among persons whose occupations necessitate a solitary life, such as shepherds, ‘ hatters,’ etc. A man to enjoy solitary life must be, according to the old proverb, a wild, beast or a god. In gregarious trades the monotony is, perhaps, even greater owing to the minute sub-division of labour. Peasants from the Highlands of Scotland, or the wilds of Connemara, who have never been outside their own parish, succeed better in the States or here than artisans from Birmingham or Manchester, because their faculties are not benumbed by confinement for years to the forty-fifth part of the process of making a pin or a skein of cotton. .It often takes a desperate struggle to get the work, which, when got, is but a Dead Sea level without a prospect of hope for, the future. Religion once supplied an e’evation from which such prospect could be commanded ; if neither religion nor practical life supply it, the result is despair. * * * «

A consideration of the table I have given will, I think, confirm my conclusions. Saxony is a great mining and manufacturing country where the hours are probably longer, and the wages smaller, than in any other equally civilised State. The conscription depresses three years of the lives of its young men with its iron hand and leaden weight, and North German Protestantism has, by its Rationalism, whittled away the existence of a.Redeemer and left the bare name of Christ as mythical founder of a .creed now all but extinct. Denmark’s place in the list, I confess I can hardly account for, unless, perhaps, on the .ground of climate and a similar rationalised religion. Prussia is in the sirne case as .Saxony, though redeemed 1 y her;larger agricultural element, and Fraici stands in the same position as Prussia. The old faith there, is practically extinct in both sexes in towns, and largely dead among men in the country. In the States, Connecticut shows the worst rdSults. In Massachusetts suicides rose from 1700 in 1861 to 4300 in 1890, or over 150 per cent in 30 years.: The old Puritan faith which nerved the arms of ,Cromwell and. his Ironsides, has either dropped like a shrivelled pea’s pod. from the hearts of the people, or has stiffened into an outlook of gloom and despair.

To turn to something more cheerful, I see there is an epidemic, of what I may call Jay-Pay-i-eide, abroad, a sort of moulting infection which seems prompting our great unpaid to discard their tail-feathers almost’as eagerly as they once prayed the gods for them. I suppose they feel like the Crow of old, in peacock's plumes. No doubt it will all end in the survival of the fittest, & phrase, the meaning of which I. can. perhaps best explain by the following anecdote from Miss Cobbe’s autobiography. Talking to Sir Charles Lyell on this doctrine she suggostol, “I suppose fittest faioans bost/* Lyall loffe tho room without reply, but presently rushed in and said, “ Suppose yon had lived in Spain in the days of the Inquisition, and had a a perfectly common-place person, who believed all she was told, you would have been burned as a heretic, she would have married and borne sons and daughters. !A stiff neck, upper lip. knee or head is a

bad equipment for success. Nowadays, as then, the knee must bow in the temple of Rimmon, and a kid-glove conscience, which can stretch a little, is a far superior tool for raking up this world’s goods to a castiron, one. The seven Waiorongomai lads who * conveyed ’ the ducks, and on detection paid for them, seem training for J.P.ships on modern principles. lapyx.