How to Observe: Morals and MannersMartineau, Harriet
Science
How to Observe: Morals and Manners
Martineau, Harriet
Manners and customs; Observation (Psychology); Social psychology -- Methodology
Suicide is very common among a race of Africans who prefer it to
slavery. They believe in a life of tropical ease and freedom after
death, and rush into it so eagerly on being reduced to slavery, that
the planters of Cuba refuse them in the market, knowing that after a few
hours, or days, in spite of all precautions, nothing but their dead
bodies will remain in the hands of their masters. The French have, of
late years, abounded in suicides, while there are few or none in
Ireland. The most vain and the most sympathetic part of the French
multitude were found to be the classes which yielded the victims. If a
young lady and her lover shot one another with pistols tied with pink
ribbons, two or three suicides amidst blue and green ribbons were sure
to follow the announcement of the first in the newspaper, till a
sensible physician suggested that suicides should not be noticed in
newspapers, or should be treated with ridicule: the advice was acted
upon, and proved by the result to be sound. This profusion of
self-murders could not have taken place amidst a serious belief of an
immediate entrance upon purgatory, such as is held by the majority of
the Irish. Only in a state of vague speculation as to another life could
the future have operated as so slight a check upon the rash impulses of
the present. The Irish, an impetuous race, like the French, and with a
good share of vanity, of sympathy, and of sentiment, are probably
deterred from throwing away life by those religious convictions and
sentiments which the French once held in an equal degree, but from which
they are now passing over into another state.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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