Thoughts on Tobacco by E. ENGLES

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 30, 1867

Thoughts on Tobacco.

By E. ENGLES

To smoke or not to smoke,—that is the question. Does it become a reasonable creature, like man, to take a filthy weed from the earth, twist it up in the shape of a cigar, set fire to one end of it, and stick the other end between the teeth, and then draw the smoke into the mouth and emit it again to pollute the air or suffocate some by-stander, who has no love for tobacco-smoke in his own mouth, much less from the mouth or nose of a stranger. Our country-readers are happily exempt from the evils which attend this practice. They have an abundance of free and wholesome air, and can breathe it uninfected with tobacco-smoke. But let the reader look at some full-grown men, with their hats on one side of their head, each of them in possession of his reason, standing on the public street, and obliging all passers by to take a puff of their smoke into their nostrils, and some ashes into their eyes, together with the little pure air that a city street can furnish. Suppose they should throw their tobacco into somebody’s well, or dump a carload of cigar-stumps into a reservoir by which some cities are supplied with water, what a general burst of indignation would there be! But have I not as good a right to pure air, as others have to pure water? Do we not continually hear of proceedings in the courts to oblige men to remove their pig-pens and slaughter-houses and chemical works when they pollute the surrounding atmosphere, and affect the people in the neighborhood? Why should not sauce for the goose be sauce for the gander? E. ENGLES.