VIOLENT DEATHS

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXXI, Issue 4953, 9 February 1937, Page 6

VIOLENT DEATHS

WAYS OF POLITICIANS. The suicide of an important politician like M. Salengro is a much rarer event in these days than it was at some periods in the past, and particularly in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, says the Manchester Guardian. Sir Herbert Maxwell, in his edition of the “Creevey Papers," made some suggestions about cause and effect: Suicide was of painfully frequent occurrence among public men in the first half of the nineteenth century. Pauli, the enemy of Marquess Wellesley, in 1808; Samuel Whitbread in 1815; Sir Samuel Romilly in 1818; and Castlereagh in 1822 are among the instances. ... It may be idle to speculate upon the source of a tendency which prevails no longer among our legislators; but those who have had occasion to peruse the memoirs and study the social habits of the period under consideration cannot have overlooked two agencies which must have sapped all but the most robust constitutions. One was the habit of hard drinking. . . . The other was the constant recourse to drastic physic and excessive bleeding to remedy the disorders induced by high living. If these were not contributing causes to suicide, their discontinuance at all events coincides with a marked reduction in its frequency. In addition to the "agencies” named, it is said of Althorp that when he became Chancellor of the Exchequer he had the razors removed from his dressing-room lest the impulse to cut short the worries and anxieties of office should overcome his resolution. It is true that the eighth Duke of Devonshire, as reported in Almeric Fitzßoy's Memoirs, asked with his sardonic humour whether “he had anything to do with an Education Bill" when told that a contemporary had committed suicide, but, outside Japan, such things as the tragedy of M. Salengro are very rare nowadays. It is true that Boulanger committed

suicide in 1891, but, if certainly a public man, Boulanger was not a statesman. Gambett’s death has been ascribed to an accidental pistol shot.