_Answer._ No. At the same time I believe that a great majority of suicides are insane. There are circumstances under which suicide is natural, sensible and right. When a man is of no use to himself, when he can be of no use to others, when his life is filled with agony, when the future has no promise of relief, then I think he has the right to cast the burden of life away and seek the repose of death. _Question_. Is a suicide necessarily a coward? _Answer._ I cannot conceive of cowardice in connection with suicide. Of nearly all things death is the most feared. And the man who voluntarily enters the realm of death cannot properly be called a coward. Many men who kill themselves forget the duties they owe to others--forget their wives and children. Such men are heartless, wicked, brutal; but they are not cowards. _Question_. When is the suicide of the sane justifiable? _Answer._ To escape death by torture; to avoid being devoured by a cancer; to prevent being a burden on those you love; when you can be of no use to others or to yourself; when life is unbearable; when in all the horizon of the future there is no star of hope. _Question_. Do you believe that any suicides have been caused or encouraged by your declaration three years ago that suicide sometimes was justifiable? _Answer._ Many preachers talk as though I had inaugurated, invented, suicide, as though no one who had not read my ideas on suicide had ever taken his own life. Talk as long as language lasts, you cannot induce a man to kill himself. The man who takes his own life does not go to others to find reasons or excuses. _Question_. On the whole is the world made better or worse by suicides? _Answer._ Better by some and poorer by others. _Question_. Why is it that Germany, said to be the most educated of civilized nations, leads the world in suicides? _Answer._ I do not know that Germany is the most educated; neither do I know that suicide is more frequent there than in all other countries. I know that the struggle for life is severe in Germany, that the laws are unjust, that the government is oppressive, that the people are sentimental, that they brood over their troubles and easily become hopeless. _Question_. If suicide is sometimes justifiable, is not killing of born idiots and infants hopelessly handicapped at birth equally so? _Answer._ There is no relation between the questions--between suicides and killing idiots. Suicide may, under certain circumstances, be right and killing idiots may be wrong; killing idiots may be right and suicide may be wrong. When we look about us, when we read interviews with preachers about Jonah, we know that all the idiots have not been killed. _Question_. Should suicide be forbidden by law?