A Modest Defence of Suicide. shirked the duties devolving upon him as a member of the commonwealth. This is why self-murder was called felony, and involved forfeiture of goods. Calchas would not per mit the body of Ajax, whe died by his own hand, to be burned. The Athenians cut off the hands of a suicide and buried the guilty instrument of his death apart from the rest of his body. In some communities all per sons over sixty years of age were free to kill themselves, if they wished to do so; and the magistrates of Marseilles, in ancient times, kept on hand a supply of poisons to be given to any citizen who, on due exami nation, was found to have good and suffi cient reasons for committing suicide. It is true, as Blackstone asserts, that the church claimed deodands as her due, and put the price of them into her coffers. But
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this fact does not explain their origin. They were an expression of the same feeling that led the public authorities to fill up a well in which a person had been drowned, not as a precautionary measure, but as a solemn act of expiation, or that condemned and confiscated a ship which, by lurching, had thrown a man overboard and caused his death. Deodands were not abolished in England until the reign of Queen Victoria. With the exception of some vestiges of primitive legislation still lingering in maritime law, they are, in modern codes, one of the latest applications of a penal principle which in Athens expatriated stocks and stones, and in mediaeval Europe excommunicated bugs and sent beasts to the stake and to the gal lows.
A MODEST DEFENCE OF SUICIDE. SUICIDE, as Lord Beaconsfield once said of free trade, is an expedient, and with out wishing to raise it to the dignity of a religion, I would suggest that it is an alter native which can at times be accepted by the individual with advantage to himself, the domestic community, and the state. It is an expedient which most men have con templated; it is an alternative which no man of reason has weighed, without admit ting it, in certain circumstances, to be the only path of honor. The man of resource, of means and invention, treads it in secret, and with dignity; it is only the poor fool, harassed and bewildered, who blunders on it in the full glare of day and publicity, leaving in his wake a trail of botched ac counts and domestic troubles, with an after math of misery and shame. We have, now, a legal recognition of kleptomania, of the influence of ancestry, of sundry other things which previous generations would have
treated with scant consideration; but has not the time arrived for a better and a juster, a more politic, appreciation of the claims of suicide? Briefly, then, I would suggest a court of suicide to which application could be made, and where all proposals would be considered on points of equity and with regard to per sonal and public advantage " in camera," and without a jury. The applicant would be required to satisfy the presiding judge or judges that his removal by death would be the best thing in his circumstances (or that it would be upon certain events happening; but of this class I will speak later), and that such a course would not be attended by counterbalancing disadvantages to other persons. Upon receiving satisfactory evi dence on these points the court would be empowered to grant the applicant a suicide license, authorizing him to take his own life legally, and without prejudice, at the place
