Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 233, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 October 1911 — LACK OF Self CONTROL AS SHOWN BY SUICIDE [ARTICLE]

LACK OF Self CONTROL AS SHOWN BY SUICIDE

Learn to Laugh, Shun Mor» bid Things, You'lt Not Want to Die. FRANTIC with terror, her voice quivering with pain, a woman sailed up police headquarters in one >f the big cities of the east a day >r two ago and cried out that a man was dying from poison at her home ind that she herself had taken the Irug in an effort to follow him through he gates of death, but the agony had *ent the veil of morbid hysteria from ier eyes and she wanted help—help tor him, help for herself, and most of ill, she wanted to live. She is living, though not yet out of langer, but the man is dead, the vic:im of one of the hundred and more tulclde pacta recorded by the police luring the past year. There was no reason for the man md her to seek death —no hindrance :o their wooing or wedding. The whole affair was simply due to overwrought nerves and the condition which so many people today work themselves up into through the belief hat they have a “spiritual call.” Among the many other tragic pacts in record is one where a- man and girl determined to seek death rather than face the future, where separation might, by some turn of fate, come to them. Another man and wife nought death beepuse he was out of work, and they didn’t want to struggle any longer with poverty. Still another couple, hindered in their wooing by opposition from the girl’s parents, shot themselves, and so the records go on, telling always the same story of the lack of self-control of modern men and women, and the lack of the' courage to be bigger than hampering fate, to meet difficulties and overcome them.

Brooding, the discussion of morbid occurrences, the rising to a high emotional pitch and the wooing of the depression which even an ordinary day will bring if you succumb to it, all these things are the first step. Then comes the hysteria due to the dream of death, then the planning, the constant strain and finally the act itself.

And all of It might be prevented if modern folk would learn to laugh, if we would put aside the modern craze and lust of morbid things and look for the happiness and the sweetness that lie all around us along the pathway of life. For there are, after all, very few trials that cannot be borne if we shoulder them bravely; very few sorrows that time does not assuage, and love that cannot prove stronger than circumstances is not worth committing suicide for.