n are those of men. I was told, at any rate, that but few women
apply to the Suicide Bureau of the Army for help in this temptation;
though, perhaps, that may be due to the greater secretiveness of the
sex.

Speaking generally, this magnitude of the evil to be attacked may be
gauged from the fact that about 3,800 people die by their own hands in
England and Wales every year, a somewhat appalling total.

Intending suicides come into the hands of the Army Bureau in various
ways. Some of them see notices in the Press descriptive of this branch
of the Social Work. Some of them are found by policemen in desperate
circumstances and brought to the Bureau, and some are sent there from
different localities by Salvation Army Officers.

I have looked through the records of numbers of these cases, but, for
obvious reasons, it is difficult to give a full and accurate
description of any of them. The reader, therefore, must be content to
accept my assurance of their genuine nature. One or two, however, may
be alluded to with becoming vagueness. Here is an example of a not
infrequent kind, when a person arrives at the office having already
attempted the deed.

A business man who had recently made a study of agnostic literature,
had become involved in certain complications, which resulted in a
quarrel with his wife. His means not being sufficient to the support
of a double establishment, he took the train to London with a bottle
of sulphonal in his pocket (not a drug to be recommended for his
purpose) and swallowed tabloids all the way to town. When he had taken
seventy-five grains, and the bottle, as I saw, was two-thirds empty,
he found that the drug worked in a way he did not expect. Instead of
killing him, it awoke his religious susceptibilities, which the course
of agnostic literature had scotched but not killed, and he began to
wonder with some earnestness whether, after all, there might not be a
Hereafter which, in the circumstances, he did not care to face.

In this acute perplexity he bethought him of the Salvation Army, and
arrived at the Bureau in a state of considerable excitement, as
quickly as a taxicab could bring him. A doctor and a fortnight in
hospital did the rest. The Army found him another situation in place
of the one which he had lost, and composed his differences with his
wife. They are now both Salvationists and very happy. So, in this
instance, all's well that ends well.

_Case Two._--A man, in a respons