Anti Slavery Bugle

MISCELLANEOUS.
Suicide.

Self-murder, by steel, lead, hemp, or poison, is of rare occurrence, and we are not now going to speak of it. But people murder themselves fractionally; they do not more than half live, which amounts to half murder. We do not mean that they do not eat, sleep and clothe themselves enough—these are not living, only the means of living. A person may apply all the means in the best and most abundant style—doing, in fact, nothing else—and not live at all. He is a sort of walking self-murderer. He may do so, and be all the time the most anxious to reach old age—may die a thousand deaths in fearing one.
What a glorious thing life, in its fulness, is! The live man has great and various plans—as various as his faculties—reaching indefinitely into the future, on all of which the minutes as they come find him at work—joyfully, fearlessly at work. One part of all his plan is, never to be disappointed. Another part is, to enjoy every thing in the universe as it floats by him. Call on him, he is glad to see you. Fool not to be. How heartily he shakes your hand. If there is nothing very amiable in you, he makes something so by his smile and hearty cheer. If that case is hopeless, and he must hate, he does it with his whole heart. He fights you with a cordiality that convinces you that he can love and his love is worth having. O the cold, dull, discouraged, dead men that walk our streets and mope in our counting-rooms! They suspect every thing, confide in nothing. One wonders they do not snuff out their little flickering of life that remains. To change the figure—what an enormous waste of manure for so small a crop of life!
Suicide begins with childhood. It is a matter of education. Our youth are trained to it. The glad, outpouring sympathies of the young, are checked, solemnized, murdered by melancholy moralizings. They are all pronounced frivolous vanities. The blossoms of present joys are blasted by the chilling fears of future misery. All this under the name of wisdom and prudence, forsooth!
The great field of man is labor. And yet on this field he dies mostly, a perpetual death, through the foolish notion that it is not his happiness, but his misery. He makes a captive, a victim, an outcast, a slave of himself all the while, though he should be a perfect king.
Even life's angels, the bright browed young men and the fair, glossy locked maidens, but half live, through worry and care for the future—for profession, settlement, business, husbands—neglecting to do their own work, and trying to do God's. There is not a young man or woman in the opening bud of life that might not, by the joyous and free expansion of our glorious nature, the frank, untrammelled flow of natural kindness, make a heaven all around.
"O, but I am tied behind the counter all day to dull business, and the customers are such awful bores!" Fancy them angels in disguise, try your most obliging and winning ways upon them, and see what effect it will have upon yourself. Be sure that your heaven is to be made wherever you are, as you go along, and you can make it, be you an apprentice or worker in a factory, or dry goods' shop, or a hardware shop, or a cook shop, or a printing office, or a book bindery, or any sort of trade, with pick axe or needle, or what not. Be always glad to see and rejoice your friends—and make friends of all you see. You can do it.—Chronotype.