The cases of voluntary resort
to poison are astonishingly few, but it must be remembered that the
foregoing figures only embrace successful suicides, and antidotes to
poison often come in season where the rope or the river would
have made quick and fatal work. _La France_ notes, regarding these
statistics, that their details show that men oftenest use pistols, and
women oftenest try poison, in their attempts at suicide. What is more
curious, each man is likely to employ an instrument familiar to him:
thus, hunters and soldiers resort to the pistol, barbers trust
the razor, shoemakers use the knife, engravers the graving-tool,
washerwomen poison themselves with potash or Prussian blue; though,
of course, these are only general rules, with a great many exceptions.
And in Paris it is said that among all ranks and professions, and in
both sexes, at least half of the suicides are by asphyxiation with
charcoal. Surely in France one hardly needs to preach any doctrine of
not patiently suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
A healthier and more inspiring morality would be that of the story of
the baron of Grogzwig and his adventure with the "Genius of Despair
and Suicide," as narrated in an episode of _Nicholas Nickleby_; for
the stout baron, after thinking over his purpose of making a voluntary
departure from this world, and finding he had no security of being any
the better for going out of it, abandoned the plan, and adopted as a
rule in all cases of melancholy to look at both sides of the question,
and to apply a magnifying-glass to the better one.
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