YOUR SON'S CIGAR | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Mar 4, 1897

YOUR SON'S CIGAR.

When the young man begins the open use of tobacco, the fond mother begins a series of too often futile expostulations. Countless mothers are daily perplexed and mortified that all their efforts to prevent the formation of the tobacco habit by the one they hold most dear, are in vain. Why do their expostulations go for so little? Most mothers, after sadly pondering the question for a few months, decide that the example of all mankind is more potent than the precepts of one mother, and retire from the field, disheartened and disappointed.

May it not be that her expostulations have not taken the right form? It is not enough to tell the boy that the tobacco habit is wicked and uncleanly and expensive; he thinks you are overly squeamish and that you overestimate its evils. To be convincing you must give him personal reasons.

The use of tobacco cannot be so dreadfully wicked, he argues, when the majority of men respected by the world and his mother, are given over to the habit. And if it is wicked—just a little wicked—what of it? Who wants to be a Miss Nancy or a “sissy”? And it cannot be so very expensive; he hates that mean spirit that counts every penny and looks long and hard at a coin before relinquishing it. Shall he begrudge the few cents spent on a pleasure in which the greater number of his fellows indulge? So the mother's pleadings are ignored, and naturally; for the boy has the best of the argument.

But it is an expensive habit, more expensive than most young men can afford. There are so many things in the world for which money may be spent, so many pleasures that money will buy, that it seems a shame to spend pennies in smoke. Many a boy spends for tobacco while at college, more than enough to take him to Europe the summer of his graduation. Can he afford to miss the pleasure and profit of such a trip? Is it a mean spirit that suggests a few weeks abroad in place of innumerable smokes? To get the most out of life is the end of all education; surely the reasoning youth can find a better investment for his coins, one that will give greater returns in real pleasure, to say nothing of profit, than cigars and tobacco.

So much for the prudential side of the question. As to the morality of smoking, it may be set down that so long as the young man thinks that a set of old-womanish men and short-haired women have united to banish the cigar because they cannot appreciate the good fellowship of a smoke, he cares little for your proclaiming that the tobacco habit is wicked. In fact, so long as he thinks any law is the result of the capricious whim or blind prejudice of any being or set of beings, human or divine, he is going to transgress and trample upon the law, if he has the spirit we expect to find in the young man of to-day. But when you show him that law is not caprice but nature, that law is not an arbitrary invention but the record of a fact, he begins to respect the law and willingly to obey it. If you show him that the use of tobacco is not wicked because you or any one else have so pronounced it, but because it is a perversion of nature, he will begin to respect what you say. It is wicked because it is injurious. Undoubtedly, more men are injured by the use of tobacco than by the use of intoxicating liquors—more men, because more men use tobacco and use it with greater persistence, and physicians are agreed that few people can habitually use tobacco without physical injury. Convince the boys of this fact, and not many of them will be so foolish as to contract the habit.—Womankind.