Among the highest suicide rates in Europe are those of Saxony and Denmark, and among the lowest those of Italy, Portugal, and Spain. You may perhaps conclude, from this, that the tendency to self-destruction is much greater among the Slavs and Scandinavians of the north than it is among the Latin peoples of the south, and that the differences are due to latitude or race; but your specious generalization is shattered when you discover that the suicide rates of Norway and Russia, both northern countries inhabited by Scandinavians and Slavs, are almost as low as those of Italy, Portugal, and Spain, all southern countries inhabited by Latins. From an ethnological point of view, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway are nearly homogeneous Scandinavian states, and we should therefore expect their suicide rates to be nearly if not quite identical; but the rate of Denmark is twice that of Sweden and three times that of Norway. The Slavs of Bohemia do not differ ethnologically from the Slavs of Dalmatia, but the suicide rate of the one group is 158 per million, while that of the other is only 14 per million. Saxony is not far away, geographically, from Belgium; but the suicide rate of the former is 324 per million, while that of the latter is only 128 per million. I am unable to offer even a conjectural solution of the problems involved in the differences thus shown to exist between populations that are ethnologically identical, or that stand at nearly the same level of educational culture and economic well being. _Germany's High Suicide Rates_ The extremely high suicide rate of the Germanic peoples long ago attracted the attention of European sociologists, but, so far as I know, it has never been satisfactorily explained. If it were limited to adults it might possibly be attributed to economic causes, particularly to the rapid development of manufacturing industry, which seems everywhere to increase the suicidal tendency; but self-destruction in Germany is almost as common among children as among grown people. Between 1883 and 1903 there were 1,125 suicides among the pupils of the public schools in Prussia alone, and most of them were of boys and girls under fifteen years of age. An investigation made by the ministry of public instruction showed that this prevalence of suicide among children was not due to the conditions of modern life in cities, inasmuch as the proportion of cases was fully as large in places of the smallest size as in crowded centers of population. It seemed to be due, rather, to an inherent suicidal tendency in the race. Racial characteristics, however, do not by any means account for the extraordinary differences in suicide rates that we find among the European peoples, as shown in the following table:[21] EUROPEAN PEOPLES GROUPED RACIALLY NUMBER OF SUICIDES PER MILLION INHABITANTS I. SLAVS In Dalmatia (about 1896) 14 European Russia (1900) 31 Bulgaria (about 1900) 118 II. SCANDINAVIANS