SOME LESSONS OF SUICIDE.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XI, Issue 34, 26 August 1893, Page 133

SOME LESSONS OF SUICIDE.

Few of the misfortunes which can overtake a man are able so to overwhelm him that they do uot leave open some avenue of hope, and the more especially if they are uot attributable to conscious error on his part. The mind so conquered by depression that it cannot see this outlet is therefore surely unhealthy. It may doubtless be free from other ordinary signs of persistent aud confirmed iusanity, but it illustrates, nevertheless, a condition of weakness which, in the grosser bodily fabric, would pass for disease. Its disorder is not less a malady because it is often transient and is not related to known organic changes. In it we rocognise the close connection between rational and moral qualities, and it is the failure of both, but especially the hitter, to influence their unfortunate possessor which is so grimly taught by suicide. Despair is the true exciting cause of such calamities, and this we take it is nothing else than moral short sight. We are all of us liable to suffer from it, and, though for the most part we know it only as a temporary disturbance of function, each of us can attest its prostrating influence aud the strength of its resistance to the curative powers of reason and of faith. The case of a lad who lately poisoned himself with chloral hydrate because he failed to pass the entrance examination at the Durham Medical School was peculiar only in its secondary details. Naturally delicate, oversensitive, and over anxious, he was stunned by his disappointment—and he died of this disease. Who has not known, like him, the infinite discomfort of a seemingly unbearable present and impossible future? Yet there ism> num more certain than that which tells us that everything comes to the patient hope which knows how to wait It is in the possession of this divinely planted quality that we have the surest remedy for all those miseries of distrust which culminate and are by some believed to end with selfdestruction. There is a subsidiary question of some interest connected with tHe case above mentioned. How came the unhappy boy to have about him a fatal dose of chloral ? There was no evidence of the medicinal administration of this drug. We are, therefore, obliged to conclude that it was, as it easily might be, purchased of some neighbouring druggist, and the fact of its prompt and purposeful misuse affords a fresh reminder of the far from adequate restriction placed by Government upon the sale of poisonous remedies,

A yonng man with pushing qualities can always get something to do, even if it is nothing better than engineering a lawn mower.