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Cry Aloud

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International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Feb 19, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 8.

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“Cry Aloud.”

LIKE arsenic and strychnine, tobacco is good as a medicine, but it is the reverse as an everyday article of use, or rather abuse. The very fact that it is so disagreeable to others should restrain any thoughtful, considerate person from using it. The fumes of a tobacco breath, the scent of the cigar or the old black pipe, is forever floating on the air in all public places and in a majority of private ones. Indeed it is the exception and not the rule to go into any public gathering and find no scent or sign of the filthy weed.
True, smoking is not allowed in the church, but chewing abounds from the pulpit to the pews, and a majority of the men’s clothes are full of the detestable and disagreeable smoke. The spittoons waft their scents around, the vestibule floats it in, and the open windows in summertime are filled with it.
However disagreeable it may be to us, there is no way of escaping the ubiquitous fragrance (?) of the filthy stuff. You lift a book from the public library and its pages reek with the vile odor. You pick up a paper from the table of the reading room and there it is again—some old smoker has puffed it full of the everlasting scent of the weed, and you read with bated breath and protesting heart. I have heard loving wives groan in deep distress while they lamented that for long years they had not had one good, clean breath of pure air in their homes, but that every corner of the house was polluted by the stench of the filthy stuff. The best land is given up to its culture. Millions of money is invested in its manufacture, and yet, like alcohol, it is one of the greatest enemies of the human race. It is time that we had anti-tobacco societies all over our land. We need them as much if not more than temperance societies, for the evil is more insidious and undermining, because so few realize the great harm to health, brain, and life that is being done by this almost universal habit of chewing and smoking.—Sel.