p. 177 | Temperance

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 13, 1882

Temperance.

Tobacco—Its Effects on the System.

IN the United States, intelligent medical men have estimated that 30,000 die every year from the use of tobacco. In Germany, the physicians have decided that of all the deaths which occur between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, one-half originate in the waste of the constitution from smoking. Such opinions should be made known to the world, especially to mothers, and girls on the eve of marriage. To expend the trifling sum of six cents a day for tobacco, amounts to $21.90 a year. This sum would be called an outrageous tax if laid on a young man for any other purpose. This sum, if put to interest, would in thirty years amount to $3,529.30. There are many thousands in this land who spend from twelve to twenty-five cents a day, which would amount to from $45 to $100 a year. To spend this sum on such a degrading poison is a crime. Some men are miserable if they cannot have fifty cents a day for cigars to soothe disturbed and aching nerves. The consumption of cigars in the city of New York, in 1850, was $10,000 a day; this would be $3,650,000 a year for cigars alone; no doubt it at this time reaches up to $4,000,000.

The nature of tobacco on the human system is sure to kindle a love for alcoholic drinks; and when a love for alcohol is coupled with tobacco, a man is doubly insured as a drunkard for life. The Rev. Mr. Trask, of Massachusetts, a lecturer, says: "Tobacco and alcohol live in endearing friendship in each other's bosom."

It is true that laws, however stringent, in regard to temperance, will prove no better than a child's toy, unless the mainspring of the disease, the tobacco mania, with the youth, is chained in its march. Mr. Delavan, of New York, says: "It is my opinion that while the use of tobacco continues, intemperance will continue to curse the world." The use of tobacco leads to the use of intoxicating drinks; they are all of one family. There may have been inebriates who were not tobaccoists, but we have not yet found them. Art, poetry, and science, have found their truth, and so must society in regard to the great vampire which has flooded the earth with its vials of degradation in the form of tobacco, causing all manner of crimes, from petty larceny to murder and incest, craft and licentiousness; the mainspring of disaffection in our legislative halls, leading to dissolution and despotism. There is no vice that acts alone. There is no evil which affects one-half of humanity, that does not also influence the other half.

Intemperance, insanity, and scrofulous diseases, are crowding every household, predominating from the poisonous properties of tobacco. Its effects on the nerve forces are exceedingly powerful, arousing to unnatural activity, or stupefying. There is one who uses tobacco that is not invariably irritable when the effect of the poison has in some degree passed away. Then the fire burns in the brain until their lips are polluted with the weed again. Paralysis is daily increasing in our country—from the contraction of the nerve forces—from this enemy. Rheumatic diseases on the right hand and on the left, from the absorption of the oils from the nerve, the narcotic of the tobacco consuming the natural supply of oil which is necessary to the nerve forces to keep them in natural running order. Dr. Adam Clarke remarks "that so inseparable are drinking and smoking, that in some places the same word expresses both acts." We sometimes hear girls and women say that they like the smell of tobacco. Such is not the case unless their system has absorbed the fetid elements of the weed from in-nate conditions or inhalation, so that their organs of smell have become diseased. Man is fully organized, by nature, with all the requisitions necessary for the qualifications of each individual organ; or put in force of action all of the requirements of nature, both moral and physical. Let those requirements be put in force and we have a paradise surrounding us. Then we should need fewer prisons, poor-houses, and lunatic asylums; no craft or creed to bind men's souls. Man is prone to evil. That may be true, so far, as when a man will use bad materials to build a house he will make a bad job. So, also, when you fill the system with bad materials that destroy the moral principle in the action of the brain, from whence cometh pure life.—Christian at Work.