Don't Smoke | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Mar 30, 1882

Don't Smoke.

DON'T smoke any more, my friend; you can always hire a Chinaman to do all that kind of dirty work, and he can do it better than you, and stay out with the pigs, and you can go in the house among clean people.

There are tobacco-using men by the hundred in California who are daily committing cruel outrages upon their own and other people's children. When the little innocents are sleeping, these ignorant men are filling the room with their noxious smoke, poisoning every breath they inhale, implanting seeds of disease and death, which are murderous in their tendency and inflict curses upon them which last through life. When the children are up and awake they are subject to the same cruelties; and when one after another of the helpless little ones half murdered in this way falls a victim to some disease that would not endanger the life of a healthy child, and is carried out to its little grave, its parents wonder why the Lord "has seen fit to deal so hardly with them," and they go on and kill another the same way. There are parents who sin in ignorance and recklessness in this way, who would commit a less cruelty if they killed their children at once with a dose of laudanum.—The Rescue.

All very good except the slur upon the poor Chinaman, who is not so addicted to smoking and drinking as his more highly civilized neighbor. John is a bad opium smoker, but that habit might have been eradicated from China if her Christian neighbors had not compelled the introduction of opium into the flowery kingdom. In the Great Assize which is coming we fear the "Melican man," will not so far outweigh "the heathen Chinee" as he now thinks.