p. 345 | Temperance by A. H. Lewis

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Aug 4, 1881

Temperance.

By A. H. Lewis

TOBACCO AND SCHOLARSHIP.

The New York Tribune (daily), for May 4, 1880, is responsible for the following significant statement:—

"The anti-tobacco reformers may find encouragement to continue their crusade against the weed, in some statistics lately published concerning smoking at Yale. Each class is graded in divisions according to scholarship, the best scholars being in the first, and so on down to the fourth, where they are, in the slang of the campus, 'not too good' scholars, but 'just good enough' to keep hanging by the eyelids. In the Junior Class it was found that only 10 out of 40 in the first division were addicted to smoking; 18 out of 37 in the second; 20 out of 27 in the third; and 22 out of 26 in the fourth. The proportion of smokers, it will be observed, increases in regular ratio with the falling off in scholarship. The obvious inference is that fumigation does not promote education."

Parents, teachers, students, and all candid men who are tobacco users will do well to respect such facts. It is easy to turn away from them with a sneer, or to read them with indifference; but neither sneers nor indifference will change or avert the facts. When similar facts have been quoted as being shown by similar experiments in the schools of Europe, many men have affected to disbelieve them. "They were too far away to be true."

The above is too near home to be denied, and too important to be disregarded. That such facts are generally disregarded by those who are the victims of tobacco intoxication, is clear proof of the benumbing and blinding influence which the poison exerts on the mental faculties. It is equally well attested that the habit blunts the moral sense in a similar way. Alcohol, tobacco, and opium all hold their victims by inducing the delusion that they are harmless, or at least are necessary, and by blunting and benumbing the conscience that otherwise would rise up against them. In the opium habit, untruthfulness is a prominent symptom; in alcoholism, the characteristic symptom is an unreliable excitability; in tobacco, a quiet, but growing indifference.

These delusions render the work of reform doubly difficult. Being unconscious of the injury which he is constantly receiving, or only partly conscious, the tobacco-user is likely to consider the one who urges the reform either as a personal enemy, whose words are to be resented, or as a mistaken fanatic, whose warnings are to be disregarded, while he is pitied. The writer is not speaking wholly from theory. He remembers well when those who urged that he was doing a sinful thing in being constantly intoxicated with tobacco were deemed to be visionary and hyper-religious. It took some months for the oft repeated truth to reach his smoke-befogged conscience, and awake it to a just conception of the case. It seemed preposterous that anything which gave so much fancied comfort could be sinful.

There are thousands of men who are on the same ground of hesitation and debate. They are weary of their slavery; ashamed of the habit as indecent, they wince under the expensiveness of a habit so much worse than useless, and yet continue the indulgence, dallying with the temptation, and growing weaker each day. The evidence that the better judgment of men condemns the practice, is seen also in the fact that users generally advise boys and the uninitiated not to form the habit. "I wish I had never used it," is the common expression of the smoker, as he lights his cigar for a new indulgence, and of the chewer who empties his much-abused mouth, that he may testify against himself. That many use it, does not lessen the wrong; it rather widens the evil. A father may say every day, "I wish I could stop; I know I ought to," but this does not keep the poison from his blood and brain, nor prevent him from passing both the appetite and its deleterious effects down to his child by the law of transmission. Wishing for freedom does not bring it, and hoping does not manufacture moral stamina and backbone.

Meanwhile, facts are accumulating which will not be set aside. Germany forbids her boys under sixteen to smoke, under penalty, because it unfits them for military service. Paralysis, cancers, and sudden death bear testimony to the increase of the evil. We hope that there is some gain in the matter of reform, but the boys of to-day are sowing the seed of thorns, which will bring measureless evil to the coming generation. It is sad to know that we must wait in dumb endurance the growth and gathering of such harvests of mental and moral evil, when the grace of God and the clear grit of manhood doing what almost all acknowledge ought to be, would soon give freedom.—A. H. Lewis, in Sabbath Recorder.