Tobacco Slavery by Editor

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 17, 1884

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 10, No. 16.

Tobacco Slavery.

By Editor

THE following remarks on the use of tobacco, from Hon. Neal Dow, in the New York Weekly Witness of Jan. 18, are very good on the subject:—

The tobacco habit is to me a perpetual wonder, as it exists among gentlemen of education and culture. I can understand very well why coarse, ignorant, and brutal men should fall into the habit and continue in it, because they have no thought and no care for the rights and comforts of others, nor whether the habit makes them a nuisance among those who do not like the intolerable odor of tobacco. There is no habit or custom among barbarians or semi-barbarous people more absurd than the tobacco habit, I think.

To be without the chew or the smoke is a torture fully equal to excessive hunger or thirst coming from long deprivation of food or drink.

Then the customary indulgence allays the pain and soon dissipates it; that is the whole of the 'comfort' coming from tobacco. We wonder at seeing a gentleman when among others, even among ladies, with a cigar in his mouth, poisoning the air which others must breathe. We do not see how any one with the qualities of a gentleman can do it. But the reason of it is, that without the smoke he will be in torment. Then, if this be so, why should he not retire to some out-of-the-way place, so as not to annoy others with smoke? The reason of this is, that the tobacco habit dulls and deadens the moral sense.

The slave of the tobacco habit does not see that tobacco and tobacco-smoke are poison. Where is the right of a man to poison the air that I must breathe more than to poison the water that I must drink? But we see this done many times every day by men who would shrink with horror at the suggestion that they were really doing so.

I was once the guest of a gentleman living in a Western State. It was a charming day, and after dinner he proposed that we should have a drive—he, his wife, and I. There came to the door a handsome carryall with a very fine pair of horses. The wife and I were on the back seat, and my host, with a cigar in his mouth, was on the front seat to drive. It was a bright, balmy day, and the fields were covered with new-mown hay. 'How delicious is the smell of the hay; the atmosphere is full of its fragrance,' said the host. 'I suppose so,' was my reply, 'but we on the back seat can smell nothing but the smoke from your cigar!' 'I beg a thousand pardons; I did not think of it,' he said. Of course not; he did not think. Why? The tobacco had dulled his moral sense.