The dependence of suicide upon such conditions as age, sex, occupation, and religion does not offer any problem as difficult and baffling as that involved in the relation of suicide to weather, nor any as curious and suggestive as that which connects suicide with war; but there is hardly a phase of the subject that does not present some more or less interesting question. The researches of Durkheim and Gubski show that, after the period of childhood, the tendency to suicide increases steadily with advancing age. In France, for example, if the population be segregated in groups comprising all persons ten to twenty years of age, all persons twenty to thirty years of age, all persons thirty to forty years of age, and so on, by decades, the annual number of suicides per million rises as follows: first group 56, second group 130, third 155, fourth 204, fifth 217, sixth 274, seventh 317, and the rate finally reaches its maximum in the group that comprises persons more than eighty years of age. In the United States, the rate increases from 128 per million, in the age group comprising persons under forty-five, to 300 per million in the age group comprising persons over sixty-five. The figures vary in different countries, according to the hereditary national suicide tendencies; but the steady increase with advancing age is common to all. These statistics would seem to support the pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer, and to prove that the longer one lives the less one wants to live; but it must not be forgotten that the suicide rate is a measure of exceptional unhappiness, not of the general welfare. In the suicidal tendencies of the sexes there is, as might be expected, a very great difference. In all countries and in all parts of the world, suicides among women are far less frequent than among men. The ratio varies from one to two to two to five. This difference is generally attributed to the supposed fact that women are sheltered and protected by men, as well as by their domestic environment, and that, consequently, they suffer less from the wear and tear of life; but I doubt very much the adequacy of this explanation. The life of women, in the world at large, is quite as hard as that of men, and often harder. In the higher and wealthier classes of society women may be, and doubtless are, sheltered and protected; but in the poorer classes they take their full share of the suffering, even if they do not bear the brunt of the struggle.