It has become a commonplace to speak of the constant increase of crime, madness and suicide. In 1840, in Prussia, out of 100,000 persons of criminally responsible age, there were 714 convictions; in 1888, 1,102 (from a letter communicated by the Prussian bureau of statistics). In 1865, in every 10,000 Europeans there were 63 suicides; in 1883, 109; and since that time the number has increased considerably. In the last twenty years a number of new nervous diseases have been discovered and named.[61] Let it not be believed that they always existed, and were merely overlooked. If they had been met with anywhere they would have been detected, for even if the theories which prevailed in medicine at various periods were erroneous, there have always been perspicacious and attentive physicians who knew how to observe. If, then, the new nervous diseases were not noticed, it is because they did not formerly appear. And they are exclusively a consequence of the present conditions of civilized life. Many affections of the nervous system already bear a name which implies that they are a direct consequence of certain influences of modern civilization. The terms ‘railway-spine’ and ‘railway-brain,’ which the English and American pathologists have given to certain states of these organs, show that they recognise them as due partly to the effects of railway accidents, partly to the constant vibrations undergone in railway travelling. Again, the great increase in the consumption of narcotics and stimulants, which has been shown in the figures above, has its origin unquestionably in the exhausted systems with which the age abounds. There is here a disastrous, vicious circle of reciprocal effects. The drinker (and apparently the smoker also) begets enfeebled children, hereditarily fatigued or degenerated, and these drink and smoke in their turn, because they are fatigued. These crave for a stimulus, for a momentary, artificial invigoration, or an alleviation of their painful excitability, and then, when they recognise that this increases, in the long-run, their exhaustion as well as their excitability, they cannot, through weakness of will, resist those habits.[62]