Suicide is not always incomprehensible, though the coroner’s jury, with its constant verdict, “during temporary insanity,” would seem to make it so. There are plenty of people afflicted by disease, medical men among them, who cut their throats or shoot themselves in desperate resignation. For purposes of convenience, they are described as of unsound mind by the considerate jury. Admittedly, an individual who takes his own life is, _primâ facie_, unbalanced--the act indicates it. Then, too, physical disease, which has preyed upon a man’s health until his judgment has become warped, produces a form of _quasi_-insanity. The suicide verdict, “whilst of unsound mind,” may also be agreeable to surviving relatives and persons with claims against insurance companies, but, strictly speaking, its accuracy is generally doubtful, unless a “warped” mental state, hysteria in women, and the product of the goadings of misfortune, are symptoms of definite insanity. If this is so, there are few people in the land who approximate “sanity.” Of course, in subjects who advance to the length of suicide the defects specified have reached the stage of personal dominion, or, under another name, _idée fixe_, in an acute form. This may technically justify the insanity verdict, but it is questionable whether anything else would, if one makes allowance for class and ignorance. By the same process, the man who is goaded into theft by sheer hunger must likewise be insane. His misfortunes have produced the hunger and the hunger the theft. Thus desperation is often forced upon a man by want of funds, something which means prospective, if not immediate, hunger, and the sense of desperation in its most active state brings about suicide. Whitaker Wright, the convicted felon, committed suicide to escape a term of penal servitude. He had a reasonable, if not a justifiable, motive for his act. So far as one remembers, off-hand, no “temporary insanity” verdict was recorded in his case. Its balsamic effect is, however, demanded in countless instances where suicides have been prompted by equally explainable motives. Altogether, the coroner’s jury’s verdict, of “suicide whilst of unsound mind,” is generally inconsistent with the actual facts which led to the act of self-destruction.