SUICIDE.

Tuapeka Times, Volume IV, Issue 221, 25 April 1872, Page 8

SUICIDE.

The " temptingness " of suicide is very insufficiently understood by writers of Mr Buckle's school. Few, probably r rightly estimate the extent to which the idea haunts the minds of the utterly miserable — it matters' notwhether their misery has been selfinduced or has come unsought for. Death to such, as it were, " opens her sweet white a.rms and whispers Peace ! : ' It is difficult, most difficult, to escape from the idea of suicide. The act is suggested by the misery itself, and the suggestion meets us at every turn in ordinary life. . . Who can say how tempting to the wretched is Seneca's teaching, that, of all the good things which the eternal law has done for man, this is the best, that although it has given ns but one entrance into life, it has given us a thousand ways to escape from it ? " T3oes life please you ?" says the Stoic ; " live on. Does if not? Go from whence you came. No vast wound is necossary ; a mere puncture will secure' your liberty. . . Do you see that precipice, that river, that well ? You wilL find liberty or freedom from misery at the bottom. Look at that tree j liberty hangs on its branch. Or do you ask, which is the road to liberty ? Your heart, your throat, and every vein in your body. Everyone ought to make his life approved by otliers, his death by himself. That kind of death is best "which pleaseth most. ... It is most unjust. to live by theft, but to steal an opportunity for dying is very becoming and beautiful"— (Ep.LXX.)

AVhen we reflect on the vast amount of unutterable and unmitiga'ble misery which exists among civilised nations, we marvel still more at the wondrous power of moral restraint which make suicides not the rule, but the exception. It needs but a glance at the statistics of the age of suicides to see that suicide is chiefly the resort of those whose energies, both physical and moral, have been worn out by years of protracted and hopeless struggling. — " Lancet."