Temperance | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Oct 14, 1880

Temperance.

THE MAJOR'S CIGAR.

"How are you quartermaster?" "Well, Major, is that you? How are you?" We met at a railway junction, and, if he had not spoken first, I should not have recognized my Virginia comrade of '64. It was not merely the disguise of a silk hat and shaven cheeks, but—as I told him, after we had chatted a little about each other's ups and downs since the war—I was sure this was the first time I ever saw him, away from the table, without a cigar in his mouth. "Haven't smoked any for five years," was his reply. "I'm 'down' on tobacco as thoroughly as you ever were." "Good! Tell me about it." We locked arms and sauntered up and down the platform. Dropping* the dialogue, this was in substance his story:—

"It wasn't a sudden conversion. I never was quite so easy in mind over the habit—when you used to banter me about it—as I pretended to be. I intended, all the time, to taper off when I got home from the army, and not smoke so much. And I did. Smoked less in three weeks than I used to in one. But one summer I went off on some business for our company, which kept me up in the mountains among the charcoal burners, three days longer than I expected. I got out of cigars, and couldn't get any for love or money. In forty-eight hours I was more uncomfortable and unstrung than I ever was before in all my life. I actually borrowed an old Irishman's filthy clay pipe and tried to smoke it. I thought of that miserable summer which we spent crawling about the trenches in Virginia, and I wished I was there again with a cigar in my mouth! Then I began to realize what a shameful bondage I was in to a mere self-indulgence. I—a fellow who secretly prided himself on his self-control, and nerve, and manliness; who never flinched at hard fare or rough weather—a downright slave to a bad habit, unnerved and actually unfit for business for lack of a cigar! It made me mad at myself: I despised myself for my pusillanimity.

"Going into the matter a little further, I found that the money I had spent for cigars in a dozen years would have paid for my house and furnished it; would have met all the bills for my wife's little summer trip to Europe with me, which has been her one air-castle so long. I saw that I had actually smoked away more money than I had laid out for our library, our periodicals, and our intellectual culture generally. Cigars had cost me nearly twice as much as I had given to church work, missions, and charity. My conscience rose up at the record. I knew I could not plead any equivalent for the outlay. It had not fed me, it had not strengthened me; it had simply drugged me. Every cigar had made the next cigar a little more necessary to my comfort. To use the mildest word, it had been a useless expenditure.

"My detention up there in the mountains was calculated to open my eyes to my domestic shortcomings, and I saw, as I never had before, how selfishly unsocial tobacco had made me at home. I smoked before I was married, and my wife never entered any protest against my cigars afterward. But our first baby was a nervous thing, and the doctor told me it would never do for it to breathe tobacco smoke. I got into the way of shutting myself up in the library, evenings, and after every meal, to enjoy my cigars. As I look at it now, nothing is more absurd than to call it a social habit. It's a poor pretense for sociability where a man is simply intent on his own enjoyment. My wife owns up, now, that my tobacco-tainted breath and tobacco-saturated clothing were always more or less of a trial to her. The satisfaction it has given her to be rid of a tobacco atmosphere, and the thought of my contemptibly selfish indifference to her comfort all those years, have humbled me, I tell you. And I wouldn't exchange my own daily satisfaction nowadays in being a cleaner man—inside and outside—for the delight that anybody can get out of his cigars.

"I didn't need to go out of my own doors to find reasons enough for giving up the habit, but I think I found still stronger ones, after all, when I went away from home. The more I thought about the harm tobacco does in the community at large, the more I felt that it was time for me to stop giving it the moral support of my example. I don't take as much stock as some folks in the terrible effects of tobacco stories. It depends a good deal on what sort of grandfathers a man had—whether they bequeathed him the temperament of an ox or a race-horse; the constitution of a bull dog or a little tan-terrier. The doctors differ on this matter, and the evidence is strong enough to convict on the other counts of the indictment anyhow. I know I smoked too much, and that my nervous system is the worse for it. And I think the people who are likely to be hurt the most by it are just the ones who are most likely to smoke excessively. And then I've noticed that the medical men who stand up for tobacco are always men who use it and are liable to the suspicion of straining a point in justification of their own self-indulgence.

"On one point, though, I believe the authorities agree. No one denies that it is a damaging indulgence for boys. It means a good deal when smoking is forbidden to the pupils in the polytechnic schools in Paris and the military schools in Germany, purely on hygienic grounds. The governments of these smoking nations are not likely to be notional on that matter. But the use of tobacco by our American boys and young men is excessive and alarming. We ought to save our rising generation for better work than they can do if tobacco saps the strength of their growing years, and makes the descent easier, as no doubt it often does, to worse vices. I don't know how to forgive myself for the temptation I set before my Sunday-school class of bright boys, year after year, by my smoking habits. I always hoped they didn't know that I smoked, but of course they did. It isn't in the family, either, that the selfishness of the habit is most apparent. I don't believe, other things being equal, there is any other class of men who show such a disregard in public for other people's comfort as tobacco users do. I don't mean the chewers who spit in country churches and leave their filthy puddles on car floors. They're hogs. A man would be considered a rowdy or a boor who would willfully spatter mud on the clothing of a lady as she passed him on the sidewalk. But a lady to whom tobacco fumes are more offensive than mud, can hardly walk the streets, in these days, but that men who call themselves gentlemen—and who are gentlemen in most other respects—blow their cigar smoke into her face at almost every step. Smokers drive non-smokers out of the gentlemen's cabins on the ferry-boats and the gentlemen's waiting-rooms in railway stations, monopolizing these public rooms as coolly as if they only had any rights in them. I can't explain such phenomena except on the theory that tobacco befogs the moral sense and makes men specially selfish. Take the people of Germany, for instance. No other western people are such smokers, and no others are so boorish in their behavior;—especially toward women. I don't insist that one fact explains the other; but I have my suspicions."

The major's train pulled in just then, and, as he took my hand to say good-by, its smoking-car drew his parting shot: "See there! Did you ever reflect how the tobacco habit levies its taxes on everybody? The railway company furnishes an extra seat to every smoker, which, in the nature of the case, must be paid for by an extra charge on the tickets of all the passengers. What a rumpus it would raise if the Legislature should attempt to furnish luxuries to any special class at public cost in this way. How we'd vote 'em down! I vote against this thing by throwing away my cigar."—S. S. Times.