CHAPTER XXXV. Suicide

SUICIDE

IN previous chapters we have discussed the moral valuation of acts, forbearances, and omissions, which directly concern the interests of other men; we shall now proceed to consider moral ideas regarding such modes of conduct as chiefly concern a man's own welfare. Among these we notice, in the first place, acts affecting his existence.

Suicide, or intentional self-destruction, has often been represented as a fruit of a higher civilisation; Dr. Steinmetz, on the other hand, in his essay on 'Suicide among Primitive Peoples,' thinks it probable that "there is a greater propensity to suicide among savage than among civilised peoples." The former view is obviously erroneous; the latter probably holds good of certain savages as compared with certain peoples of culture, but cannot claim general validity.

Among several uncivilised races suicide is said to be unknown. To these belong some of the lower savages--the Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego, the Andaman Islanders, {230} and various Australian tribes; whilst as regards most other tribes at about the same stage of culture information seems to be wanting. Of the natives in Western and Central Australia Sir G. Grey writes, "Whenever I have interrogated them on this point, they have invariably laughed at me, and treated my question as a joke." When a Caroline Islander was told of suicides committed by Europeans, he thought that he had not grasped what was said to him, as he never in his life had heard of anything so ridiculous. The Káfirs of the Hindu-Kush, though they have no intense fear of death, cannot understand suicide; "the idea of a man killing himself strikes them as inexplicable."

Among many savages and barbarians suicide is stated to be very rare, or to occur only occasionally; whereas {231} among others it is represented as either common or extremely prevalent. Of the Kamchadales we are told that the least apprehension of danger drives them to despair, and that they fly to suicide as a relief, not only from present, but even from imaginary evil; "not only those who are confined for some offence, but such as are discontented with their lot, prefer a voluntary death to an uneasy life, and the pains of disease." Among the Hos, an Indian hill tribe, suicide is reported to be so frightfully prevalent as to afford no parallel in any known country:--"If a girl appears mortified by anything that has been said, it is not safe to let her go away till she is soothed. A reflection on a man's honesty or veracity may be sufficient to send him to self-destruction. In a recent case, a young woman attempted to poison herself because her uncle would not partake of the food she had cooked for him." Among the Karens of Burma suicide is likewise very common where Christianity has not been introduced. If a man has some incurable or painful disease, he says in a matter-of-fact way that he will hang himself, and he does as he says; if a girl's parents compel her to marry the man she does not love, she hangs herself; wives sometimes hang themselves through jealousy, sometimes because they quarrel with their husbands, and sometimes out of mere {232} chagrin, because they are subject to depreciating comparisons; and it is a favourite threat with a wife or daughter, when not allowed to have her own way, that she will hang herself. Among some uncivilised peoples suicide is frequently practised by women, though rarely by men.

The causes which, among savages, lead to suicide are manifold:--disappointed love or jealousy; illness or old age; grief over the death of a child, a husband, or a {233} wife; fear of punishment; slavery or brutal treatment by a husband; remorse, shame or wounded pride, anger or revenge. In various cases an offended person kills himself for the express purpose of taking revenge upon the offender. Thus among the Tshi-speaking peoples of the Gold Coast, "should a person commit suicide, and before so doing attribute the act to the conduct of another person, that other person is required by native law to undergo a like fate. The practice is termed killing oneself upon the head of another, and the person whose conduct is supposed to have driven the suicide to commit the rash act is visited with a death of an exactly similar nature"--unless, indeed, the family of the suicide be pacified with a money compensation. With reference to the Savage Islanders, who especially in heathen {234} times were much addicted to suicide, we are told that, "like angry children, they are tempted to avenge themselves by picturing the trouble that they will bring upon the friends who have offended them." Among the Thlinkets an offended person who is unable to take revenge in any other way commits suicide in order to expose the person who gave the offence to the vengeance of his surviving relatives and friends. Among the Chuvashes it was formerly the custom for enraged persons to hang themselves at the doors of their enemies. A similar method of taking revenge is still not infrequently resorted to by the Votyaks, who believe that the ghost of the deceased will then persecute the offender. Sometimes a suicide has the character of a human sacrifice. In the times of epidemics or great calamities the Chukchi sacrifice their own lives in order to appease evil spirits and the souls of departed relatives. Among some savages it is common for a woman, especially if married to a man of importance, to commit suicide on the death of her husband, or to demand to be buried with him; and many Brazilian Indians killed themselves on the graves of their chiefs.

In various other cases, besides the voluntary sacrifices of widows or slaves, the suicides of savages are connected with their notions of a future life. The belief in the new {235} human birth of the departed soul has led West African negroes to take their own lives when in distant slavery, that they may awaken in their native land. Among the Chukchi there are persons who kill themselves for the purpose of effecting an earlier reunion with their deceased relatives. Among the Samoyedes it happens that a young girl who is sold to an old man strangles herself in the hope of getting a more suitable bridegroom in the other world. We are told that the Kamchadales inflict death on themselves with the utmost coolness because they maintain that "the future life is a continuation of the present, but much better and more perfect, where they expect to have all their desires more completely satisfied than here." The suicides of old people, again, are in some cases due to the belief that a man enters into the other world in the same condition in which he left this one, and that it consequently is best for him to die before he grows too old and feeble.

The notions of savages concerning life after death also influence their moral valuation of suicide. Where men are supposed to require wives not only during their lifetime, but after their death, it may be a praiseworthy thing, or even a duty, for a widow to accompany her husband to the land of souls. According to Fijian beliefs, the woman who at the funeral of her husband met death with the greatest devotedness would become the favourite wife in the abode of spirits, whereas a widow who did not permit herself to be killed was considered an adulteress. Among the Central African Bairo those women who refrained from destroying themselves over their husbands' graves were regarded as outcasts. On the Gold Coast a man of low rank who has married one of the king's sisters is {236} expected to make away with himself when his wife dies, or upon the death of an only male child; and "should he outrage native custom and neglect to do so, a hint is conveyed to him that he will be put to death, which usually produces the desired effect." The customary suicides of the Chukchi are solemnly performed in the presence and with the assistance of relatives and neighbours. The Samoyedes maintain that suicide by strangulation "is pleasing to God, who looks upon it as a voluntary sacrifice, which deserves reward." The opinion of the Kamchadales that it is "allowable and praiseworthy" for a man to take his own life, was probably connected with their optimistic notions about their fate after death. And that the habitual suicides of old persons have the sanction of public opinion is particularly obvious where they may choose between killing themselves and being killed.

Whilst in some cases suicide opens the door to a happy land beyond the grave, it in other cases entails consequences of a very different kind. The Omahas believe that a self-murderer ceases to exist. According to the Thompson Indians in British Columbia, "the souls of people who commit suicide do not go to the land of souls. The shamans declare they never saw such people there; and some say that they have looked for the souls of such people, but could not find their tracks. Some shamans say they cannot locate the place where the souls of suicides go, but think they must be lost, because they seem to disappear altogether. Others say that these souls die, and cease to exist. Still others claim that the souls never leave the earth, but wander around aimlessly." So also the Jakuts believe that the ghost of a self-murderer never {237} comes to rest. Sometimes the fate of suicides after death is represented as a punishment which they suffer for their deed. Thus the Dacotahs, among whom women not infrequently put an end to their existence by hanging themselves, are of opinion that suicide is displeasing to the "Father of Life," and will be punished in the land of spirits by the ghost being doomed for ever to drag the tree on which the person hanged herself; hence the women always suspend themselves to as small a tree as can possibly sustain their weight. The Pahárias of the Rájmahal Hills, in India, say that "suicide is a crime in God's eyes," and that "the soul of one who so offends shall not be admitted into heaven, but must hover eternally as a ghost between heaven and earth," The Kayans of Borneo maintain that self-murderers are sent to a place called Tan Tekkan, where they will be very poor and wretched, subsisting on leaves, roots, or anything they can pick up in the forests, and being easily distinguished by their miserable appearance. According to Dyak beliefs, they go to a special place, where those who have drowned themselves must thenceforth live up to their waists in water, and those who have poisoned themselves must live in houses built of poisonous woods and surrounded by noxious plants, the exhalations of which are painful to the spirits. In other instances we are simply told that the souls of suicides, together with those of persons who have been killed in war, or who have died a violent death, are not permitted to live with the rest of the souls, to whom their presence would cause uneasiness. Among the Hidatsa Indians some people say that the ghosts of men {238} who have made away with themselves occupy a separate part of the village of the dead, but that their condition in no other wise differs from that of the other ghosts.

It is, however, hard to believe that the fate of the self-murderer, whether it be annihilation, a vagrant existence on earth, or separation in the other world, was originally meant as a punishment; for a similar lot is assigned to the souls of persons who have been drowned, or who have died by accident or violence. It seems that the suicide's future state is in the first place supposed to depend upon the treatment of his corpse. Frequently he is denied burial, or at least the ordinary funeral rites, and this may give rise to the notion that his soul never comes to rest or, possibly, even ceases to exist. Or he is buried by himself, apart from the other dead, in which case his soul must naturally remain equally isolated. Among the Alabama Indians, for instance, "when a man kills himself, either in despair or in a sickness, he is deprived of burial, and thrown into the river." In Dahomey "the body of any person committing suicide is not allowed to be buried, but thrown out into the fields to be devoured by wild beasts." Among the Fantis of the Gold Coast "il y a des places réservées aux suicides et à ceux qui sont morts de la petite vérole. Ils sont enterrés à l'écart loin de toute {239} habitation et de tout chemin public." In the Pelew Islands a self-murderer is buried not with his own deceased relatives, but in the place where he ended his life, as are also the corpses of those who fall in war. Among the Bannavs of Cambodia "anyone who perishes by his own hand is buried in a corner of the forest far from the graves of his brethren." Among the Sea Dyaks "those who commit suicide are buried in different places from others, as it is supposed that they will not be allowed to mix in the seven-storied heaven with such of their fellow-country men as come by their death in a natural manner or from the influence of the spirits." The motive for thus treating self-murderers' bodies is superstitious fear. Their ghosts, as the ghosts of persons who have died by any other violent means or by accident, are supposed to be particularly malevolent, owing to their unnatural mode of death or to the desperate or angry state of mind in which they left this life. If they are not buried at all, or if they are buried in the spot where they died or in a separate place, that is either because nobody dares to interfere with them, or in order to prevent them from mixing with the other dead. So also murdered persons are sometimes left unburied, and people who are supposed to have been killed by evil spirits are buried apart; whilst those struck with lightning are either denied interment, or buried where they fell and in the position in which they died. We sometimes hear of a connection between the way in which a suicide's body is treated and the moral opinion as regards his deed. Among the Alabama Indians his corpse {240} is said to be thrown into the river "because he is looked upon as a coward"; and of the Ossetes M. Kovalewsky states that they bury suicides far away from other dead persons because they regard their act as sinful. But we may be sure that moral condemnation is not the original cause of these practices.

It is comparatively seldom that savages are reported to attach any stigma to suicide. To the instances mentioned above a few others may be added. The Waganda, we are told, greatly condemn the act. Among the Bogos "a man never despairs, never gives himself up, and considers suicide as the greatest indignity." The Karens of Burma deem it an act of cowardice; but at the same time they have no command against it, they "seem to see little or no guilt in it," and "we are nowhere told that it is displeasing to the God of heaven and earth." The Dacotahs said of a girl who had destroyed herself because her parents had turned her beloved from the wigwam, and would force her to marry a man she hated, that her spirit did not watch over her earthly remains, being offended when she brought trouble upon her aged mother and father. In Dahomey "it is criminal to attempt to commit suicide, because every man is the property of the king. The bodies of suicides are exposed to public execration, and the head is always struck off and sent to Agbomi; at the expense of the family if the suicide were a free man, at that of his master if he were a slave." On the other hand, it is expressly stated of various savages that they do not punish attempts to commit suicide. The negroes of Accra see nothing wrong in the act. "Why," they would ask, "should a person not be {241} allowed to die, when he no longer desires to live?" But they inflict cruel punishments upon slaves who try to put an end to themselves, in order to deter other slaves from doing the same. Among the Pelew Islanders suicide "is neither praised nor blamed." The Eskimo around Northumberland Inlet and Davis Strait believe that any one who has been killed by accident, or who has taken his own life, certainly goes to the happy place after death. The Chippewas hold suicide "to be a foolish, not a reprehensible action," and do not believe it to entail any punishment in the other world. In his sketches of the manners and customs of the North American Indians, Buchanan writes:--"Suicide is not considered by the Indians either as an act of heroism or of cowardice, nor is it with them a subject of praise or blame. They view this desperate act as the consequence of mental derangement, and the person who destroys himself is to them an object of pity."

From the opinions on suicide held by uncivilised races we shall pass to those prevalent among peoples of a higher culture. In China suicide is extremely common among all classes and among persons of all ages. For those who have been impelled to this course by a sense of honour the gates of heaven open wide, and tablets bearing their names are erected in the temples in honour of virtuous men or women. As honourable self-murderers are regarded servants or officers of state who choose not to survive a defeat in battle or an insult offered to the sovereign of their country; young men who, when an insult has been paid to their parents which they are unable to avenge, prefer not to survive it; and women who kill {242} themselves on the death of their husbands or fiancés. In spite of imperial prohibitions, sutteeism of widowed wives and brides has continued to flourish in China down to this day, and meets with the same public applause as ever; whilst those widowed wives and brides who have lost their lives in preserving their chastity, are entitled both to an honorary gate and to a place in a temple of the State as an object of worship. Another common form of suicide which is admired as heroic in China is that committed for the purpose of taking revenge upon an enemy who is otherwise out of reach--according to Chinese ideas a most effective mode of revenge, not only because the law throws the responsibility of the deed on him who occasioned it, but also because the disembodied soul is supposed to be better able than the living man to persecute the enemy. The Chinese have a firm belief in the wandering spirits of persons who have died by violence; thus self-murderers are supposed to haunt the places where they committed the fatal deed and endeavour to persuade others to follow their example, at times even attempting to play executioner by strangling those who reject their advances. "Violent deaths," says Mr. Giles, "are regarded with horror by the Chinese"; and suicides committed from meaner motives are reprobated. It is said in the Yü Li, or "Divine Panorama"--a Taouist work which is very popular all over the Chinese Empire--that whilst persons who kill themselves out of loyalty, filial piety, chastity, or friendship, will go to heaven, those who do so "in a trivial burst of rage, or fearing the consequences of a crime which would not amount to death, or in the hope of falsely injuring a {243} fellow-creature," will be severely punished in the infernal regions. No pardon will be granted them; they are not, like other sinners, allowed to claim their good works as a set-off against evil, whereby they might partly escape the agonies of hell and receive some reward for their virtuous deeds. Sometimes suicide is classified by the Chinese as an offence against religion, on the ground that a person owes his being to Heaven, and is therefore responsible to Heaven for due care of the gift.

"The Japanese calendar of saints," says Mr. Griffis, "is not filled with reformers, alms-givers, and founders of hospitals or orphanages, but is overcrowded with canonised suicides and committers of harakiri. Even to-day, no man more . . . surely draws homage to his tomb, securing even apotheosis, than the suicide, though he may have committed a crime." There were two kinds of harakiri, or "belly-cutting," one obligatory and the other voluntary. The former was a boon granted by government, who graciously permitted criminals of the Samurai, or military, class thus to destroy themselves instead of being handed over to the common executioner; but this custom is now quite extinct. Voluntary harakiri, again, was practised out of loyalty to a dead superior, or in order to protest, when other protests might be unavailing, against the erroneous conduct of a living superior, or to avoid beheading by the enemy in a lost battle, or to restore injured honour if revenge was impossible. Under any circumstances harakiri cleansed from every stain, and ensured an honourable interment and a respected memory. It is said in a Japanese manuscript, "To slay his enemy against whom he has cause of hatred, and then to kill himself, is the part of a noble Samurai, and it is sheer nonsense to look upon the place where he has disembowelled {244} himself as polluted." In old days the ceremony used to be performed in a temple.

Among the Hindus we meet with the practice of self-immolation of widows--until recently very prevalent in many parts of India--and various forms of self-destruction for religious purposes. Suicide has always been considered by the Hindus to be one of the most acceptable rites that can be offered to their deities. According to the Ayen Akbery, there were five kinds of suicide held to be meritorious in the Hindu, namely:--starving; covering himself with cow-dung and setting it on fire and consuming himself therein; burying himself in snow; immersing himself in the water at the extremity of Bengal, where the Ganges discharges itself into the sea through a thousand channels, enumerating his sins, and praying till the alligators come and devour him; cutting his throat at Allahabad, at the confluence of the Ganges and Jumna. To these might be added drowning at Hurdwar, Allahabad, and Saugor; perishing in the cold of the Himalayas; the practice of dying under the wheels of Juggurnath's car; and the custom of men throwing themselves down from certain rocks to fulfil the vows of their mothers, or to receive forgiveness for sins, or to be re-born rajas in their next state of transmigration. It is also common for persons who are afflicted with leprosy or any other incurable disease to bury or drown themselves with due ceremonies, by which they are considered acceptable sacrifices to the deity, or to roll themselves into fires with the notion that thus purified they will receive a happy transmigration into a healthy body. Suicide was further {245} resorted to by Brâhmans for the purpose of avenging an injury, as it was believed that the ghost of the deceased would persecute the offender, and, presumably, also because of the great efficacy which was attributed to the curse of a dying Brâhman. When one of the Rajput rajas once levied a war-subsidy on the Brâhmans, some of the wealthiest, having expostulated in vain, poniarded themselves in his presence, pouring maledictions on his head with their last breath; and thus cursed, the raja laboured under a ban of excommunication even amongst his personal friends. We are told of a Brâhman girl who, having been seduced by a certain raja, burned herself to death, and in dying imprecated the most fearful curses on the raja's kindred, after which they were visited with such a succession of disasters that they abandoned their family settlement at Baliya, where the woman's tomb is worshipped to this day. Once when a raja ordered the house of a Brâhman to be demolished and resumed the lands which had been conferred upon him, the latter fasted till he died at the palace gate, and became thus a Brahm, or malignant Brâhman ghost, who avenged the injury he had suffered by destroying the raja and his house. At Azimghur, in 1835, a Brâhman "threw himself down a well, that his ghost might haunt his neighbour." The same idea undoubtedly underlies the custom of "sitting dharna" which was practised by creditors who sat down before the doors of their debtors threatening to starve themselves to death if their claims were not paid; and the sin attached to causing the death of a Brâhman would further increase the efficacy of the creditor's threats. At the same time religious suicide is said to be a crime in a Brâhman. And in the sacred books we read that for him who destroys {246} himself by means of wood, water, clods of earth, stones, weapons, poison, or a rope, no funeral rites shall be performed by his relatives; that he who resolves to die by his own hand shall fast for three days; and that he who attempts suicide, but remains alive, shall perform severe penance. The Buddhists allow a man under certain circumstances to take his own life, but maintain that generally dire miseries are in store for the self-murderer, and look upon him as one who must have sinned deeply in a former state of existence. It should be added that in India, as elsewhere, the souls of those who have killed themselves or met death by any other violent means are regarded as particularly malevolent and troublesome.

The Old Testament mentions a few cases of suicide. In none of them is any censure passed on the perpetrator of the deed, nor is there any text which expressly forbids a man to die by his own hand; and of Ahithophel it is said that he was buried in the sepulchre of his father. It seems, however, that according to Jewish custom persons who had killed themselves should be left unburied till sunset, perhaps for fear lest the spirit of the deceased otherwise might find its way back to the old home. Josephus, who mentions this custom, denounces suicide as an act of cowardice, as a crime most remote from the common nature of all animals, as impiety against the Creator; and he maintains that the souls of those who have thus acted madly against themselves will go to the darkest place in Hades. The Talmud considers suicide justifiable, if not meritorious, in the case of the chief of a vanquished army who is sure of disgrace and death at the hands of the exulting conqueror, or when a person has {247} reason to fear being forced to renounce his religion. In all other circumstances the Rabbis consider it criminal for a person to shorten his own life, even when he is undergoing tortures which must soon end his earthly career; and they forbid all marks of mourning for a self-murderer, such as wearing sombre apparel and eulogising him. Islam prohibits suicide, as an act which interferes with the decrees of God. Muhammedans say that it is a greater sin for a person to kill himself than to kill a fellow-man; and, as a matter of fact, suicide is very rare in the Moslem world.

Ancient Greece had its honourable suicides. The Milesian and Corinthian women, who by a voluntary death escaped from falling into the hands of the enemy, were praised in epigrams. The story that Themistocles preferred death to bearing arms against his native country was circulated with a view to doing honour to his memory. The tragedians frequently give expression to the idea that suicide is in certain circumstances becoming to a noble mind. Hecuba blames Helena for not putting an end to her life by a rope or a sword. Phaedra and Leda kill themselves out of shame, Haemon from violent remorse. Ajax decides to die after having in vain attempted to kill the Atreidae, maintaining that "one of generous strain should nobly live, or forthwith nobly die." Instances are, moreover, mentioned of women killing themselves on the death of their husbands; and in Cheos it was the custom to prevent {248} the decrepitude of old age by a voluntary death. At Athens the right hand of a person who had taken his own life was struck off and buried apart from the rest of the body, evidently in order to make him harmless after death. Plato says in his 'Laws,' probably in agreement with Attic custom, that those who inflict death upon themselves "from sloth or want of manliness," shall be buried alone in such places as are uncultivated and nameless, and that no column or inscription shall mark the spot where they are interred. At Thebes self-murderers were deprived of the accustomed funeral ceremonies, and in Cyprus they were left unburied. The objections which philosophers raised against the commission of suicide were no doubt to some extent shared by popular sentiments. Pythagoras is represented as saying that we should not abandon our station in life without the orders of our commander, that is, God. According to the Platonic Socrates, the gods are our guardians and we are a possession of theirs, hence "there may be reason in saying that a man should wait, and not take his own life until God summons him." Aristotle, again, maintains that he who from rage kills himself commits a wrong against the State, and that therefore the State punishes him and civil infamy is attached to him. The religious argument could not be foreign to a people who regarded it as impious interference in the order of nature to make a bridge over the Hellespont and to separate a landscape from the continent; and the idea that suicide is a matter of public concern evidently prevailed in Massilia, where no man was allowed to make away with himself unless the magistrates had given him permission to do so. But the {249} opinions of the philosophers were anything but unanimous. Plato himself, in his 'Laws,' has no word of censure for him who deprives himself by violence of his appointed share of life under the compulsion of some painful and inevitable misfortune, or out of irremediable and intolerable shame. Hegesias, surnamed the "death-persuader," who belonged to the Cyrenaic school, tried to prove the utter worthlessness and unprofitableness of life. According to Epicurus we ought to consider "whether it be better that death should come to us, or we go to him." The Stoics, especially, advocated suicide as a relief from all kinds of misery. Seneca remarks that it is a man's own fault if he suffers, as, by putting an end to himself, he can put an end to his misery:--"As I would choose a ship to sail in, or a house to live in, so would I choose the most tolerable death when about to die. . . . Human affairs are in such a happy situation, that no one need be wretched but by choice. Do you like to be wretched? Live. Do you like it not? It is in your power to return from whence you came." The Stoics did not deny that it is wrong to commit suicide in cases where the act would be an injury to society; Seneca himself points out that Socrates lived thirty days in prison in expectation of death, so as to submit to the laws of his country, and to give his friends the enjoyment of his conversation to the last. Epictetus opposes indiscriminate suicide on religious grounds:--"Friends, wait for God; when he shall give the signal and release you from this service, then go to him; but for the present endure to dwell in the place where he has put you." Such a signal, however, is given often enough: it may consist in incurable disease, intolerable pain, or misery of any kind. "Remember this: the door is open; be not more timid {250} than little children, but as they say, when the thing does not please them, 'I will play no longer,' so do you, when things seem to you of such a kind, say I will no longer play, and be gone: but if you stay, do not complain." Pliny says that the power of dying when you please is the best thing that God has given to man amidst all the sufferings of life.

It seems that the Roman people, before the influence of Christianity made itself felt, regarded suicide with considerable moral indifference. According to Servius, it was provided by the Pontifical laws that whoever hanged himself should be cast out unburied; but from what has been said before it is probable that this practice only owed its origin to fear of the dead man's ghost. Vergil enumerates self-murderers not among the guilty, but among the unfortunate, confounding them with infants who have died prematurely and persons who have been condemned to die on a false charge. Throughout the whole history of pagan Rome there was no statute declaring it to be a crime for an ordinary citizen to take his own life. The self-murderer's rights were in no way affected by his deed, his memory was no less honoured than if he had died a natural death, his will was recognised by law, and the regular order of succession was not interfered with. In Roman law there are only two noteworthy exceptions to the rule that suicide is a matter with which the State has nothing to do: it was prohibited in the case of soldiers, and the enactment was made that the suicide of an accused person should entail the same consequences as his condemnation; but in the latter instance the deed was admitted as a confession of guilt. On the other {251} hand, it seems to have been the general opinion in Rome that suicide under certain circumstances is an heroic and praiseworthy act. Even Cicero, who professed the doctrine of Pythagoras, approved of the death of Cato.

In no question of morality was there a greater difference between classical and Christian doctrines than in regard to suicide. The earlier Fathers of the Church still allowed, or even approved of, suicide in certain cases, namely, when committed in order to procure martyrdom, or to avoid apostacy, or to retain the crown of virginity. To bring death upon ourselves voluntarily, says Lactantius, is a wicked and impious deed; "but when urged to the alternative, either of forsaking God and relinquishing faith, or of expecting all torture and death, then it is that undaunted in spirit we defy that death with all its previous threats and terrors which others fear." Eusebius and other ecclesiastical writers mention several instances of Christian women putting an end to their lives when their chastity was in danger, and their acts are spoken of with tenderness, if not approbation; indeed, some of them were admitted into the calendar of saints. This admission was due to the extreme honour in which virginity was held by the Fathers; St. Jerome, who denied that it was lawful in times of persecution to die by one's own hands, made an exception for cases in which a person's chastity was at stake. But even this exception was abolished by St. Augustine. He allows that the virgins who laid violent hands upon themselves are worthy of compassion, but declares that there was no necessity for their doing so, since chastity is a virtue of {252} the mind which is not lost by the body being in captivity to the will and superior force of another. He argues that there is no passage in the canonical Scriptures which permits us to destroy ourselves either with a view to obtaining immortality or to avoiding calamity. On the contrary, suicide is prohibited in the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," namely, "neither thyself nor another"; for he who kills himself kills no other but a man. This doctrine, which assimilates suicide with murder, was adopted by the Church. Nay, self-murder was declared to be the worst form of murder, "the most grievous thing of all"; already St. Chrysostom had declared that "if it is base to destroy others, much more is it to destroy one's self." The self-murderer was deprived of rights which were granted to all other criminals. In the sixth century a Council at Orleans enjoined that "the oblations of those who were killed in the commission of any crime may be received, except of such as laid violent hands on themselves"; and a subsequent Council denied self-murderers the usual rites of Christian burial. It was even said that Judas committed a greater sin in killing himself than in betraying his master Christ to a certain death.

According to the Christian doctrine, as formulated by Thomas Aquinas, suicide is utterly unlawful for three reasons. First, everything naturally loves itself and preserves itself in being; suicide is against a natural inclination and contrary to the charity which a man ought to bear towards himself, and consequently a mortal sin. {253} Secondly, by killing himself a person does an injury to the community of which he is a part. Thirdly, "life is a gift divinely bestowed on man, and subject to His power who 'killeth and maketh alive'; and therefore he who takes his own life sins against God, as he who kills another man's slave sins against the master to whom the slave belongs, and as he sins who usurps the office of judge on a point not referred to him; for to God alone belongs judgment of life and death." The second of these arguments is borrowed from Aristotle, and is entirely foreign to the spirit of early Christianity. The notion of patriotism being a moral duty was habitually discouraged by it, and, as Mr. Lecky observes, "it was impossible to urge the civic argument against suicide without at the same time condemning the hermit life, which in the third century became the ideal of the Church." But the other arguments are deeply rooted in some of the fundamental doctrines of Christianity--in the sacredness of human life, in the duty of absolute submission to God's will, and in the extreme importance attached to the moment of death. The earthly life is a preparation for eternity; sufferings which are sent by God are not to be evaded, but to be endured. The man who deliberately takes away the life which was given him by the Creator displays the utmost disregard for the will and authority of his Master; and, worst of all, he does so in the very last minute of his life, when his doom is sealed for ever. His deed, as Thomas Aquinas says, is "the most dangerous thing of all, because no time is left to expiate it by repentance." He who kills a fellow-creature does not in the same degree renounce the protection of God; he kills only the body, whereas the self-murderer kills both the body and the soul. By denying the latter the right of Christian {254} burial the Church recognises that he has placed himself outside her pale.

The condemnation of the Church influenced the secular legislation. The provisions of the Councils were introduced into the law-books. In France Louis IX. enforced the penalty of confiscating the self-murderer's property, and laws to the same effect were passed in other European countries. Louis XIV. assimilated the crime of suicide to that of lèze majesté. According to the law of Scotland, "self-murder is as highly criminal as the killing our neighbour." In England suicide is still regarded by the law as murder committed by a man on himself; and, unless declared insane, the self-murderer forfeited his property as late as the year 1870, when forfeitures for felony were abolished. In Russia, to this day, the testamentary dispositions of a suicide are deemed void by the law.

The horror of suicide also found a vent in outrages committed on the dead body. Of a woman who drowned herself in Edinburgh in 1598, we are told that her body was "harled through the town backwards, and thereafter hanged on the gallows." In France, as late as the middle of the eighteenth century, self-murderers were dragged upon a hurdle through the streets with the face turned to the ground; they were then hanged up with the head downwards, and finally thrown into the common sewer. However, in most cases the treatment to which suicides bodies were subject was not originally meant as a punishment, but was intended to prevent their spirits {255} from causing mischief. All over Europe wandering tendencies have been ascribed to their ghosts. In some countries the corpse of a suicide is supposed to make barren the earth with which it comes in contact, or to produce hailstorms or tempests or drought. At Lochbroom, in the North-West of Scotland, the people believe that if the remains of a self-murderer be taken to any burying-ground which is within sight of the sea or of cultivated land, this would prove disastrous both to fishing and agriculture, or, in the words of the people, would cause "famine (or dearth) on sea and land"; hence the custom has been to inter suicides in out-of-the-way places among the lonely solitudes of the mountains. The practice of burying them apart from other dead has been very wide-spread in Europe, and in many cases there are obvious indications that it arose from fear. In the North-East of Scotland a suicide was buried outside a churchyard, close beneath the wall, and the grave was marked by a single large stone, or by a small cairn, to which the passing traveller was bound to cast a stone; and afterwards, when the suicide's body was allowed to rest in the churchyard, it was laid below the wall in such a position that no one could walk over the grave, as the people believed that if a woman enceinte stepped over such a {256} grave, her child would quit this earth by its own act. In England persons against whom a coroner's jury had found a verdict of felo de se were buried at cross-roads, with a stake driven through the body so as to prevent their ghosts from walking. For the same purpose the bodies of {257} suicides were in many cases burned. And when removed from the house where the act had been committed, they were commonly carried out, not by the door, but by a window, or through a perforation specially made for the occasion in the door, or through a hole under the threshold, in order that the ghost should not find its way back into the house, or perhaps with a view to keeping the entrance of the house free from dangerous infection.

However, side by side with the extreme seventy with which suicide is viewed by the Christian Church, we find, even in the Middle Ages, instances of more humane feelings towards its perpetrator. In mediæval tales and ballads true lovers die together and are buried in the same grave; two roses spring through the turf and twine lovingly together. In the later Middle Ages, says M. {258} Bourquelot, "on voit qu'à mesure qu'on avance, l'antagonisme devient plus prononcé entre l'esprit religieux et les idées mondaines relativement à la mort volontaire. Le clergé continue à suivre la route qui a été tracée par Saint Augustin et à déclarer le suicide criminel et impie; mais la tristesse et le désespoir n'entendent pas sa voix, ne se souviennent pas de ses prescriptions." The revival of classical learning, accompanied as it was by admiration for antiquity and a desire to imitate its great men, not only increased the number of suicides, but influenced popular sentiments on the subject. Even the Catholic casuists, and later on philosophers of the school of Grotius and others, began to distinguish certain cases of legitimate suicide, such as that committed to avoid dishonour or probable sin, or that of a condemned person saving himself from torture by anticipating an inevitable death, or that of a man offering himself to death for the sake of his friend. Sir Thomas More, in his Utopia, permits a person who is suffering from an incurable and painful disease to take his own life, provided that he does so with the agreement of the priests and magistrates; nay, he even maintains that these should exhort such a man to put an end to a life which is only a burden to himself and others. Donne, the well-known Dean of St. Paul's, wrote in his younger days a book in defence of suicide, "a Declaration," as he called it, "of that paradoxe, or thesis, that Self-homicide is not so naturally sin, that it may never be otherwise." He there pointed out the fact--which ought never to be overlooked by those who derive their arguments from "nature"--that some things may be natural to the species, and yet not natural to every individual member of it. In one of his essays Montaigne pictures classical cases of suicide with colours of unmistakable sympathy. "La plus volontaire mort," he {259} observes, "c'est la plus belle. La vie despend de la volonté d'aultruy; la mort, de la nostre." The rationalism of the eighteenth century led to numerous attacks both upon the views of the Church and upon the laws of the State concerning suicide. Montesquieu advocated its legitimacy:--"La société est fondée sur un avantage mutuel; mais lorsqu'elle me devient onéreuse, qui m'empêche d'y renoncer? La vie m'a été donnée comme une faveur; je puis donc la rendre lorsqu'elle ne l'est plus: la cause cesse, l'effet doit donc cesser aussi." Voltaire strongly opposed the cruel laws which subjected a suicide's body to outrage and deprived his children of their heritage. If his act is a wrong against society, what is to be said of the voluntary homicides committed in war, which are permitted by the laws of all countries? Are they not much more harmful to the human race than self-murder, which nature prevents from ever being practised by any large number of men? Beccaria pointed out that the State is more wronged by the emigrant than by the suicide, since the former takes his property with him, whereas the latter leaves his behind. According to Holbach, he who kills himself is guilty of no outrage on nature or its author; on the contrary, he follows an indication given by nature when he parts from his sufferings through the only door which has been left open. Nor has his country or his family any right to complain of a member whom it has no means of rendering happy, and from whom it consequently has nothing more to hope. Others eulogised suicide when committed for a noble end, or recommended it on certain occasions. "Suppose," says Hume, "that it is no longer in my {260} power to promote the interest of society; suppose that I am a burthen to it; suppose that my life hinders some person from being much more useful to society. In such cases my resignation of life must not only be innocent but laudable." Hume also attacks the doctrine that suicide is a transgression of our duty to God. "If it would be no crime in me to divert the Nile from its course, were I able to do so, how could it be a crime to turn a few ounces of blood from their natural channel? Were the disposal of human life so much reserved as the peculiar province of the Almighty that it were an encroachment on his right for men to dispose of their own lives, would it not be equally wrong of them to lengthen out their lives beyond the period which by the general laws of nature he had assigned to it? My death, however voluntary, does not happen without the consent of Providence; when I fall upon my own sword, I receive my death equally from the hands of the Deity as if it had proceeded from a lion, a precipice, or a fever."

Thus the main arguments against suicide which had been set forth by pagan philosophers and Christian theologians were scrutinised and found unsatisfactory or at least insufficient to justify that severe and wholesale censure which was passed on it by the Church and the State. But a doctrine which has for ages been inculcated by the leading authorities on morals is not easily overthrown; and when the old arguments are found fault with new ones are invented. Kant maintained that a person who disposes of his own life degrades the humanity subsisting in his person and entrusted to him to the end that he might uphold it. Fichte argued that it is our duty to preserve our life and to will to live, not for the sake of life, but because our life is the exclusive condition of the realisation of the moral law through us. According to Hegel it is a contradiction to speak of a person's right over his life, since this would {261} imply a right of a person over himself, and no one can stand above and execute himself. Paley, again, feared that if religion and morality allowed us to kill ourselves in any case, mankind would have to live in continual alarm for the fate of their friends and dearest relations--just as if there were a very strong temptation for men to shorten their lives. But common sense is neither a metaphysician nor a sophist. When not restrained by the yoke of a narrow theology, it is inclined in most cases to regard the self-murderer as a proper object of compassion rather than of condemnation, and in some instances to admire him as a hero. The legislation on the subject therefore changed as soon as the religious influence was weakened. The laws against suicide were abolished in France by the Revolution, and afterwards in various other continental countries; whilst in England it became the custom of jurymen to presume absence of a sound mind in the self-murderer--perjury, as Bentham said, being the penance which prevented an outrage on humanity. These measures undoubtedly indicate not only a greater regard for the innocent relatives of the self-murderer, but also a change in the moral ideas concerning the act itself**.

As appears from this survey of facts, the moral valuation of suicide varies to an extreme degree. It depends partly on the circumstances in which the act is committed, partly on the point of view from which it is regarded and the notions held about the future life. When a person sacrifices his life for the benefit of a fellow-man or for the sake of his country or to gratify the supposed desire of a god, his deed may be an object of the highest praise. It may, further, call forth approval or admiration as indicating a keen sense of honour or as a test of courage; in Japan, says Professor Chamberlain, "the courage to take {262} life--be it one's own or that of others--ranks extraordinarily high in public esteem." In other cases suicide is regarded with indifference as an act which concerns the agent alone. But for various reasons it is also apt to give rise to moral disapproval. The injury which the person committing it inflicts upon himself may excite sympathetic resentment towards him; he may be looked upon as injurer and injured at the same time. Plato asks in his 'Laws':--"What ought he to suffer who murders his nearest and so-called dearest friend? I mean, he who kills himself." And the same point of view is conspicuous in St. Augustine's argument, that the more innocent the self-murderer was before he committed his deed the greater is his guilt in taking his life--an argument of particular force in connection with a theology which condemns suicides to everlasting torments and which regards it as a man's first duty to save his soul. The condemnation of killing others may by an association of ideas lead to a condemnation of killing one's self, as is suggested by the Christian doctrine that suicide is prohibited in the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill." The horror which the act inspires, the fear of the malignant ghost, and the defiling effect attributed to the shedding of blood, also tend to make suicide an object of moral reprobation or to increase the disapproval of it; and the same is the case with the exceptional treatment to which the self-murderer's body is subject and his supposed annihilation or miserable existence after death, which easily come to be looked upon in the light of a punishment. Suicide is, moreover, blamed as an act of moral cowardice, and, especially, as an injury inflicted upon other persons, to whom the agent {263} owed duties from which he withdrew by shortening his life. Even among savages we meet with the notion that a person is not entitled to treat himself just as he pleases. Among the Goajiro Indians of Colombia, if anybody accidentally cuts himself, say with his own knife, or breaks a limb, or otherwise does himself an injury, his family on the mother's side immediately demands blood-money, since, being of their blood, he is not allowed to spill it without paying for it; the father's relatives demand tear-money, and friends present claim compensation to repay their sorrow at seeing a friend in pain. That a similar view is sometimes taken by savages with regard to suicide appears from a few statements quoted above. The opinion that suicide is an offence against society at large is particularly likely to prevail in communities where the interests of the individual are considered entirely subordinate to the interests of the State. The religious argument, again, that suicide is a sin against the Creator, an illegitimate interference with his work and decrees, comes to prominence in proportion as the moral consciousness is influenced by theological considerations. In Europe this influence is certainly becoming less and less. And considering that the religious view of suicide has been the chief cause of the extreme severity with which it has been treated in Christian countries, I am unable to subscribe to the opinion expressed by Professor Durkheim, that the more lenient judgment passed on it by the public conscience of the present time is merely accidental and transient. The argument adduced in support of this opinion leaves out of account the real causes to which the valuation of suicide is due: it is said that the moral evolution is not likely to be retrogressive in this particular point after it has followed {264} a certain course for centuries. It is true that moral progress has a tendency to increase our sense of duty towards our fellow-men. But at the same time it also makes us more considerate as regards the motives of conduct; and--not to speak of suicides committed for the benefit of others--the despair of the self-murderer will largely serve as a palliation of the wrong which he may possibly inflict upon his neighbour.