p. 4 | Perilous Times by L. A. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D.C. · Mar 10, 1904

“Perilous Times”

By L. A. S.

In a recent issue of The Independent one of the foremost educators of New York City, Mr. Charles B. Hubbell, calls public attention to a new national peril,—the cigarette habit. Twenty-five years ago, says Mr. Hubbell, the cigarette was almost unknown in this country, its use being first observed at a polytechnic school at Troy, N. Y., among students from Cuba and South America. “The cigarette habit and the inhaling habit spread from that point until now it is more devastating to the health and morals of boys and young men,” he says, “than any habit or vice that can be named.”

It is a strong statement to make, that within the last twenty-five years a vice more deadly than any previously known has arisen in, and is fastening its hold

upon the young people of this country; but made by such authority, its truth is hardly open to question. The visible effects of this vice in the public schools have amply demonstrated its nature and possibilities. Mr. Hubbell continues:—

The astonishing feature of the situation is that so comparatively few people realize the inroads that it has already made on the health, morals, and possibilities of usefulness of our American youth. One explanation of this, in my opinion, is contained in the fact that a very large number of physicians in every community are addicted to the cigarette and the inhaling habit, and naturally are handicapped in the influence that they should exert in advising and suppressing this alarming evil. It is seldom that one meets a medical student who is not banefully addicted to this vice, and once the cigarette habit becomes established, its servitude is almost certain and unending.

The greater evil of this form of tobacco indulgence over other older forms of its use is due to the “inhaling habit,” to which it naturally leads. “The juvenile cigarette smoker,” Mr. Hubbell says, “almost immediately learns to inhale the smoke. Not one cigarette smoker in twenty, I venture to assert, uses them in any other way, and when once the victim has acquired the inhaling habit in connection with cigarettes, he can seldom secure any satisfaction with pipe or cigar without indulging his inhaling propensities.” The difference between this inhaling and ordinary smoking, Mr. Hubbell explains, is that the inhaler draws the smoke into the upper air-passages of the lungs, instead of simply into the mouth. In the lungs the deadly products of the smoke, chief among which is carbon monoxide gas, are taken up and carried into the circulation, producing a slight dizziness and a mild but very fascinating intoxication.

Of the effects of this vice observed upon boys in the public schools, our authority says:—

Boys of ten, twelve, and fourteen years of age, naturally bright, were observed to be losing the power of concentration and application of mind. Nervousness, listlessness, and a tendency to truancy were associated with the names of nearly every one of them. Further investigation disclosed the fact that very many of these boys stole money from their parents, or sold all sorts of articles that they could lay their hands on, in order that they might gratify an appetite that fed on its own indulgence. A justice of the supreme court of this State, since deceased, told me that in his last year that he was practising at his bar, he had had nine office boys in his employ who had been discharged for stealing postage-stamps, it having been proved in every instance that the boys stole in order to purchase cigarettes. The police magistrates of this and other cities have stated again and again that the majority of juvenile delinquents appearing before them are cigarette fiends, whose moral nature has been warped or destroyed through the instrumentality of this vice. The managers and trustees of institutions for the correction and reformation of youthful offenders have the same story.

Mr. Hubbell says that so far as his information goes, “there is not a college in the country where any effort has been made to stamp out the cigarette inhaling habit, and little or no effort has been made to warn college students who are leaving our academic institutions every year by hundreds, with health more or less shattered, as a direct result of four years’ indulgence in the inhaling habit. Many of the physicians in the college towns are themselves inhaling fiends, and are not in a position to give influential advice.”

It is as a national more than an individual evil that this new vice presents its most serious aspect. What is to be expected from men who in youth had their moral natures warped or destroyed by cigarette indulgence? Are national prosperity and peace, or the reverse of these, to be expected under a government conducted by such individuals? The use of tobacco among men in this country is almost universal; it is securing a strong hold even upon women; and the cigarette is rapidly becoming the most popular form of indulgence. Such developments of evil are what we may expect in the last days, when the end draws near. They are what bring society in the last days to a condition comparable to that of the days of Noah and of Lot, as the Scripture has foretold. And in the light of such facts, how evident it is that now especially the heart of the fathers should be turned to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers. Mal. 4:6. Fortunate are those who receive and obey special instruction from God for the safeguarding of their children in this evil time.

L. A. S.