The question of what can be done to lessen the suicide tendency and check this great waste of human power and energy brings me to the only important cause of self-destruction which seems to me removable, and that is newspaper publicity. No argument is needed to prove that man is essentially an imitative animal. In dress, in behavior, in speech, in modes of thought, and in social conventions, we are all prone to do what we see others do; and when unhappy men and women learn, from the newspapers, that scores of other unhappy people are daily escaping from their troubles through the always open door of suicide, when familiarity with the idea of self-destruction deprives the act of all its natural terror, it is not at all surprising that they yield to what seems to be the general current of their social environment. I have, in my own collection of material, a surprisingly large number of cases in which the suicidal act may be traced directly to newspaper publicity and imitation; but I must limit myself to a single striking illustration--the suicidal epidemic in Emporia, Kansas, in the summer of 1901. As a result, apparently, of the publication of the details of two or three suicides of people prominent in that little Kansas town, there broke out an epidemic of self-destruction which culminated in the sunny, flowery month of June, and which carried the annual suicide rate from about 90 per million to 1,665 per million--a rate five times greater than that of Saxony. Mr. Morse, the mayor of the city, consulted the Board of Health, and decided to stop the publication of the details of suicides in the local papers, even if it should require the employment of force. He issued a proclamation, on the 16th of June, in which he said: "I have consulted the Board of Health, and if the Emporia papers do not comply with my request, I shall have a right to stop, and I will stop summarily, the publication of these suicide details, under the law providing for the suppression of epidemics. There is clearly an epidemic in this city, and although it is mental, it is none the less deadly. Its contagion may be clearly shown to come from what is known in medicine as the psychic suggestion, found in the publication of the details of suicides. If the paper on which the local journals are printed had been kept in a place infected with small-pox, I could demand that the journals stop using that paper, or stop publication. If they spread another contagion--the contagious suggestion of suicide--I believe the liberty of the press is not to be considered before the public welfare, and that the courts would sustain me in using force to prevent the publication of newspapers containing matter clearly deleterious to the public health."