en, too, war restrains suicide by strengthening the bonds of social
sympathy and drawing large masses of people more closely together. The
unhappy man always thinks of himself as lonely, isolated, and out of
harmony with his environment; but when, as a result of the victories or
defeats of war, he finds himself participating in the triumph or sharing
the grief of thousands of other persons, the mere consciousness of
sympathetic association with his fellow-men becomes a source of comfort
and consolation to him and makes his life more endurable. But war is not
the only agency that exerts a restraining influence upon
self-destruction. Any great calamity which causes intense public
excitement, and which at the same time draws people together in friendly
sympathy and cooeperation, lowers the suicide rate. The calamity may
greatly intensify suffering, and may make life, for a time, almost
intolerable; but it does not increase the number of persons who try to
escape from life; on the contrary, it reduces it.

_San Francisco Earthquake Decreased Suicides_

A striking illustration of this fact was furnished by San Francisco in
1906. Before the earthquake and fire of April 18 the suicides in that
city averaged twelve a week. After the earthquake, when the whole
population was homeless, destitute, and exposed to hardships and
privations of every kind, there were only three suicides in two months.
The decrease, therefore, in the suicide rate was more than 97 per cent.
This surprising result of a disheartening and depressing calamity was
due partly to the excitement of life under new and extraordinary
conditions, and partly to the feeling, which every man had, that he was
enduring and working with a host of sympathetic comrades, and not
suffering and striving alone. If life were always vividly interesting,
as it was in San Francisco after the earthquake, and if all men worked
and suffered together as the San Franciscans did for a few weeks,
suicide would not end ten thousand American lives every year, as it does
now.

The dependence of suicide upon such conditions as age, sex, occupation,
and religion does not offer any problem as difficult and baffling as
that involved in the relation of suicide to weather, nor any as curious
and suggestive as that which connects suicide with war; but there is
hardly a phase of the subject that does not present some more or less
interesting question. The researches of Durkheim and Gubski show t