Danger in Smoke by Editor

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jan 17, 1884

Danger in Smoke.

By Editor

KANSAS is mourning over the death of one of her most valued citizens, Congressman D. C. Haskell. The Kansas City Times speaks of the causes of his death as follows:—

“Mr. Haskell died from two causes only: First, overwork. Second, oversmoke. He ought to have lived; he might have lived, with reasonable husbandry of his resources, until seventy-five or eighty years would have still found him in the harness. . . . He delighted in physical exercise, and had tremendous muscular powers, until, within a few years, hard work broke him down, and cruelly, wantonly, wasted his energies.

“At the early age of 41 he dies a victim to the two causes named above. . . . During the long hours of the night that he devoted to the study of industrial questions he was an inveterate and constant smoker. Even during the sessions of the House he persisted in his ‘day smoke,’ and the inevitable chewing of the stump of the cigar.”

Schuyler Colfax would have been in his grave years ago if he had not stopped smoking. He was on the point of breaking down, when he listened to wise counsel and threw away the cigar. And Stephen A. Douglas robbed the world of twenty years of his labor by inattention to the laws of health; in a word, by intemperate habits. And many a youth of to-day will sink into an early grave, after a useless life, by reason of the abominable practice of smoking cigarettes, even as many have gone already.

But words of warning will do no good to such. Smoke has a terrible power to blunt the sensibilities, as is manifested in the selfishness of smokers, who seem to have no manner of regard for the feelings of others, but remorselessly puff the nauseating fumes into the faces of men, women, and innocent children. We have known husbands and fathers, who pretended to have much affection for their families, who would persist in smoking a dirty pipe in the room where a wife or child was suffering with lung diseases! Such conduct is worthy only of barbarians. If their sensibilities could be aroused, we would that some of them could see these words, and be led to consider the crime which they are committing.

SIGNS.