CHAPTER V
SUICIDAL MANIA
In the north of Europe and of Asia (and probably also in other parts of the world) there used to prevail an idea that it was cowardly and selfish to lay on one's tribe the burden of one's support after one could no longer serve it by hunting or in war. Everyone who survived till old age was bound to kill himself or be put to death by his friends. The imagination of all young persons, for many generations, was filled with the idea of suicide as both a duty and an inevitable fate. What wonder, then, that in some families a sudden fit of reversion to ancestral type produces an impulse towards suicide?
It was also desirable to prevent the tribe from being burdened with the weakly. Infanticide (as a preferable alternative to the desertion and exposure of the weakly young) thus became the duty of many parents; of many for whom, owing to the strength of their parental affection, infanticide partook far more of the character of a higher kind of suicide than of anything which can legitimately be called homicide. The killing of a weakly child is now a crime. The impulse towards killing a beloved infant is (rightly) now considered a symptom of in-sanity, i.e. a not healthy form of reversion; not
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