Temperance | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Nov 30, 1882

Temperance.

The Tobacco Nuisance.

WE have suffered from it ourselves and seen others suffer; ladies and gentlemen and people who had reached that honored age when their comfort and convenience should be a restraint on the company they are in. We have suffered enough to be indignant, though we must confess, in strict self-examination, that what prompts us to protest is no high ethical zeal, like that which fired the bosom of Mr. Trask and his disciples. Disgust and indignation, and a sense of having had indignities practiced upon us by the votaries of the weed is the highest moral range we rise to on this present occasion.

We do not undertake any preachment on the morality, nor on the hygienic aspect of the matter. What we say is that any man who uses tobacco is bound to take his pleasure in a way which does not annoy his neighbor. The best that he can say for his practice is, that he enjoys it. There is no food in it, and it is not taken for medicine. Possibly it rests him, or quiets his nerves, or puts him in good humor. The sum of it is, that he enjoys it as a personal luxury.

But he has no right to take his comfort out of other people, and the trouble with tobacco seems to be that it makes people blind to the annoyance they give others in using it. Your genuine smoker comes to feel that he has a right to all the air, in doors and out of doors, and feels himself abused and wronged when men or women put in a claim to breathe it without the tobacco admixture. Ladies abroad tell us that it is no gentleman who would smoke in their presence without asking permission; but, on the other hand, both ladies and gentlemen agree that no lady would venture to refuse permission, when asked.

On both sides of the water we are rapidly coming to a point lower than this, where no permission is asked of man or woman. Your smoky friend plants himself to the windward on all occasions, and blows the dead smoke he is done with in your eyes. It is hard to find a retreat. On the Baltimore and Ohio Railway we have known ladies to be smoked out of their costly seats in the drawing-room cars. This catastrophe is not impossible on other lines. The smoking saloon vents itself into the drawing-room. On steamer decks and hotel piazzas there is no escape, and too often one retreats to his chamber in the hotel to find, like the Light Brigade, at Balaklava, "Cannon to right of them, cannon to left of them."

Now, we do not know why our comfort is not as much of an object as any one's. People who do not smoke have rights, and rights which claim priority and are not to be trespassed on in this way.

If people will smoke, let them remember how great a nuisance they may easily make themselves, unless they take pains to avoid it. Society has a right to require them to be cleanly in their habit. An uncleanly smoker, who does not take great pains with his person, soon becomes intolerable in society, more offensive than a smoky chimney. Refined ladies shudder at the approach of his redolent personality. Dead smoke in the curtains and walls is too much for fresh air, rose-buds, and good housekeeping combined.

Beau Brummell broke off an engagement because the lady used cabbage. Yet, such are the caprices of society, that had tobacco been in vogue then as it is now, he might have claimed his right to puff in the lady's face or have loaded her tapestries with his odors. He might even have offered her the choice of his "Opera Puffs," and wished to see the light curls rising from her fairy lips.

Izaak Walton wondered that the horse, "the honestest beast alive, should have such a strange power to make men dishonest." Tobacco lovers might, with more reason, wonder why manners go down on the approach of their favorite weed. The fact is not to be denied. Tobacco is no school of manners. About all that can be required of the habitual smoker is, that he shall not be a nuisance. This we insist on.—Independent.