A Tobacco Generation

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Sep 3, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 36.

A Tobacco Generation

“A Tobacco Generation.”—A local city paper truly calls this “a tobacco generation,” and remarks:—

Never since Sir Walter Raleigh enjoyed his first pipe has the warfare of anti-tobacco crusaders been less effective than it is now. To the man about town the problem of the continued existence of so many cigar shops becomes more perplexing every year. In almost every hotel, large or small; in almost every barroom and drug store cigars are sold. Nevertheless, in the cities, and towns, and villages, from Alaska to Patagonia, in every zone and every clime, every shop in which nothing but tobacco in one form or another is sold, seems to eke out an existence. How can such hosts of shops get a sufficient number of patrons to keep them going?

In this city amazing rentals for quarters on frequented corners are paid by the dealers who cater to the tastes of devotees of tobacco. The ranks of the chewers and the takers of snuff have been extensively reduced in this generation, but the innumerable host of men and boys who seek solace in cigars, cigarettes, and pipes, and spend a great deal of money in the worship of the nicotine goddess every year, grows even more rapidly than the percentage of the advance in population.

And what an awfully sad thing it is that it is so. Tobacco is a recruiting agent of whisky. Surely opposition to the curse is needed to save the boys.