The most prevalent methods of suicide in Europe are, first, hanging, second, drowning. In the United States they are, first, poisoning, second, shooting. About three fourths of all the persons who commit suicide in the United States use pistol or poison. The difference between European and American methods is probably due to the fact that on the other side of the Atlantic drugs and fire-arms are not so easily obtainable as they are here, and Europeans therefore resort to water and the rope as the best and surest means accessible. Police restrictions and regulations make it almost impossible for a Russian peasant to get either poison or a pistol; but all the police in the empire cannot prevent him from drowning himself in a pond, or hanging himself in his own barn. A careful comparison of all the facts accessible seems to show that in Europe, at least, suicide bears a certain definite relation to education and manufactures; and that, as I have already said, it is a by-product of the great, complicated world-machine that we call modern civilization. Its specific causes, so far as they can be ascertained, are, on the educational side, the development of increased nervous and psychic sensibility, which makes men feel more acutely all wants, deprivations, misfortunes, and sufferings; and, on the manufacturing side, a monotony of employment which wearies and exhausts the body while it gives little exercise to the educated mind and leaves the latter free to brood over its unsatisfied longings and desires, as well as its many trials and disappointments. There are other causes, such as the growing disproportion between wants generally and the means of gratification generally; alcoholism; unhealthful work, especially in manufacturing districts; barrack and tenement-house life; and all the evils incident to poverty, overcrowding, and bad sanitary conditions in cities. So far as I can see, these causes, at present, are not removable. Education must continue to intensify sensibility and increase the number of men's wants, and the great economic machine must grind on, even though it crush thousands of human beings, every year, in the cogs of its innumerable wheels. A high suicide rate is part of the price that we pay for the educational and material achievements upon which we pride ourselves. We have greatly multiplied the means of human happiness, but whether, on the whole, we have increased the sum total of human happiness is perhaps an open question. In any event, the high and rapidly increasing suicide rate shows that we are pushing the weaklings to the wall.