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The Schoolboy and the Cigarette

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Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jan 26, 1911

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 88, No. 4.

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The Schoolboy and the Cigarette

By Wm. H. Hamby

EVERY mother,—at least every normal mother,—as she stands in the door and watches her boy away on his first morning to school, has a vision of what she would like him to be, and makes a prayer in her heart that in the coming years he may have health and character and success.
And the teacher,—if she be an earnest teacher,—as she looks that first morning into the searching, wondering eyes of that boy, must utter a prayer in her heart that he may grow up wise and good and useful.
These wishes are one. The business man, the lawmaker, the doctor, the teacher, the preacher, the father, and above all the mother, are wishing for the boy the selfsame thing,—that he be strong and clean and successful.
It is this wish in the hearts of all who care for the boyhood of to-day and the manhood of to-morrow, that is making them bitter enemies of the cigarette.
The war on the cigarette habit is not the mere clamor of professional agitators, a sentimental outbreak of reform impulse, but a cool, dispassionate, vital struggle for the very body and brain and soul of the boy.
In 1903 the State of Missouri enacted a law making it a hundred-dollar fine to sell or give cigarettes or cigarette material to any boy under eighteen. In 1909 that law was strengthened by another, making it a ten-dollar fine for any boy to smoke cigarettes in any public place, on any road or street, in any business house or place of amusement.
Kansas has a law prohibiting the sale of cigarettes in any form to anybody. Almost every State in the Union has some form of anticigarette law, designed to protect the boy from the evil.
What means all this legislation?—It means that the cigarette is recognized as a deadly enemy to that supreme wish for the boy,—that he be strong and clean and successful.
He can not be strong and use it. No habitual cigarette smoker ever won any athletic contest.
It is absolutely impossible for a cigarette-smoking schoolboy to grow into healthy manhood.
Dr. Morgan Clint, in discussing the physiological effects of tobacco in general, says: “In the anemic, pasty-complexioned, undersized weakling called a ‘cigarette fiend’ we see the effect of tobacco at its worst. Here is a youth who should be just growing into manhood, the possessor of vigorous health and strength. Instead, we have an old man in his teens, prematurely aged and decrepit, who is injured both physically and mentally beyond all hope of repair. In school he is a dullard, incapable of concentration. Socially he can make no progress; for his person is offensive. In athletics he is a nonentity; for his lungs are weakened.”
A fever that kills ten per cent of its victims is a dreaded disease; one that kills twenty per cent is a scourge; and a disease that kills half of those it attacks is a terrible plague.
But cigarette smoking, begun early in boyhood and continued, wrecks the health of every one of its victims. I do not know of a single exception. I have never known a boy who began to smoke cigarettes under the age of fourteen, and continued the habit, who was not a physical wreck before twenty-seven.
And physical strength is not all that is sacrificed. No boy can be strong mentally and smoke.
Teachers everywhere confess that it is practically impossible to educate a boy who uses tobacco, especially cigarettes. It so diseases the brain and nervous system that application, concentration, and clearness and buoyancy of mind are impossible.
With scarcely a single exception, from the commissioner of education down, all superintendents, school boards, and teachers who have to do with the education of boys, are implacable foes to the cigarette habit. President David Starr Jordan, of Leland Stanford University, even forbids college men from using cigarettes anywhere on the university grounds.
H. H. Seerley, principal of the Iowa State Normal, says: “After making a study of several hundred boys, running through a period of ten years, I have not met a pupil who is addicted to the habit that will go through a single day’s work and have good lessons.
“So far as my observations have extended, not a single boy has passed the examination required for admission to the high school after he has acquired the habit; and not one has graduated from the high school who began the habit after beginning his course in the high school.
“Pupils under the influence of the weed are constant subjects of discipline, are not truthful, practise deception, and can not be depended upon.”
Even more appalling, if possible, than the wreck of health and mind, is the effect of the habit on a boy’s morals.
Judge Lindsey, of Denver,—and the boy never had a better friend than Ben B. Lindsey,—speaks emphatically: “I have been in the juvenile court nearly ten years; and in that time I have had to deal with thousands and thousands of boys who have disgraced themselves and their parents, and who have brought sorrow and misery into their lives; and I do not know of any one habit that is more responsible for the trouble of these boys than the vile cigarette habit.”
With a pretty wide experience as a student of boys, a worker among them and for them, the writer is convinced that a clean moral life and the cigarette habit are practically impossible in the same boy.
I have never seen or heard of a single boy who began the use of cigarettes under fifteen, and continued the habit, who had not before the age of twenty-five become immoral, a drunkard, a gambler, or a drug-fiend; and most of them become the victims of two, three, or all of these deadly sins.
And of course success is impossible. Neither wealth nor fame, neither success nor usefulness, is in store for the cigarette-smoking schoolboy. Cigarettes have been well named “coffin nails.” They are more: before the coffin is reached, they nail up every door to success. Across every call for responsible helpers is branded, “No cigarette smokers wanted.”
The ease and frequency and apparent cheapness by which this habit may be practised doubles its evils. And how to keep the boy from the cigarette and the cigarette from the boy has become a vital question to every lover of the human race.—Wm. H. Hamby, in American Motherhood.