The Tobacco Habit

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Sep 1, 1909

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 36, No. 34.

The Tobacco Habit

How rarely is a voice lifted against the once widely reprobated tobacco habit. It may not be described as universal, but surely there are few habits more nearly so among men. Is there to be no check to its triumphal march? If but half what is reported about it be true, the habit in one of its forms, the smoking of cigarets, is making rapid progress among women.

It is reported that the smokers of the United States in the year 1907 consumed eight and one-half billions of cigars, to say nothing of the millions of pounds of the weed consumed in pipes and cigarets, and chewed. In seven years the consumption of cigarets more than doubled, the amount of those used last year being 5,300,000,000.

In 1896 the value of the tobacco raised in this country as it came from the farms was $24,258,000. Seven years later it was $76,234,000. In pounds, the product of the country each year amounts to nearly 850,000,000. Our own fields do not produce sufficient to satisfy the demand of our citizens. The value of the tobacco imported in 1907 in various forms was nearly $35,000,000, covering 40,000,000 pounds.

The tobacco industry of the country, it is figured, is providing an average of 100 cigars, 60 cigarets, and unguessable quantities of chewing, snuffing, and pipe-filling tobacco for every man, woman, and child in the United States. Their voices are not heard, but there is yet a remnant who have not offered up the smoke incense or polluted their mouths with the product of the nicotian goddess. It would be a most salutary, and to many a most welcome, movement which would influence men widely to set themselves against the tobacco habit.—The United Presbyterian.