Temperance | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Feb 1, 1883

Temperance.

Civil Rights vs Tobacco.

WOULD that the regulations as to the use of tobacco were far more numerous and stringent—that our railroad directors might label certain cars, For the Unclean, and then prohibit smokers or chewers from entering any other!

As it is, the irrepressible smoker follows you wherever you go. You seat yourself in a car, and in utter disregard of the printed ordinance, 'Smoking forbidden,' in some subtle, indescribable fashion, the dreaded odor assails you in front and rear. You pay an extra dollar and retreat to a Pullman. Vain effort! From the conductor's room, or regions unknown, comes the same sickening vapor.

"I was glad," said Thoreau, when at Cape Cod, "to have got out of the towns, where I am wont to feel unspeakably mean and disgraced, to have left behind me for a season the bars of Massachusetts, where the full-grown are not weaned from the savage and filthy habits—still smoking. My spirits rose in proportion to the outward dreariness. The towns need to be ventilated. The gods would be pleased to see some pure flames from their altars. They are not to be appeased with cigar smoke."

The outlook has not improved since Thoreau's day. On a Sunday summer's evening, you wander forth to an out-door meeting on the hill-side. Once, twice, and yet again you change your seat to escape the vicinity of some smoker who is polluting the pure air around you.

You go on board a steamer, anticipating a pleasant sail on lake or river. When everything is arranged, you take a seat on deck. Presently you are haunted by that unmistakable odor, and turning, you find a gentleman near by puffing away without the remotest consciousness that he is disturbing any one. You move your seat to get out of his range, but that only brings you into the vicinity of another offender. Verily there is no escape. The smokers persist in planting themselves before you, or behind you, or beside you, and no one says them nay.

You betake yourself to some rural retreat. But no matter how secluded it may be, there will be some way of getting through it, whether by car, coach, or cart. And whatever the vehicle, somebody will be in it, and that somebody will be sure to smoke, or chew, or both.

Even the broad ocean offers no asylum. In spite of printed enactments, the lawless wind bears the dreadful odors "abaft the helm," directly into your face. Can the moral atmosphere engendered by this habit be any more securely locked in? A traveler says: "One of the foulest places I ever saw for blackguard, profanity, and indecent language, was the smoking-room of an ocean steamer." And this testimony is abundantly confirmed.

Is there, then, I repeat, absolutely no refuge, no quarantine by which these noxious, ever pursuing, ever persecuting spirits of the air can be effectually shut out from the innocent?

"Chewers," one writes, "eject their saliva upon the sidewalk, in the store, in spittoons, which become incorporate stenches, in dark corners of railroad cars, to stain the white skirts of unsuspicuous women, in lecture-rooms and churches, upon fences, and into stoves that hiss with anger at the insult. And the quids after they are ejected—!"

"Some smoke till their bedrooms and shops can scarcely be breathed in, and until their breath is as rank as the breath of a foul beast, and their clothes have the odor of the sewer."

And this loathsome without is only a fit exponent of the equally loathsome within. Says Dr. Alcott: "If the interior of the tobacco-user could be fairly exposed to the public gaze, I am not sure but it would do more to deter the rising generation from falling into this foul habit than all our lectures, and essays, and homilies."

Did no one suffer except the willing victim, the case would be different. But the dreadful penalty, though well-nigh as universal as that following the sin of Adam, falls heaviest on the nearest and dearest—on those who can never escape the sickening atmosphere.

Daniel Webster said, "If gentlemen must smoke," or chew, he might as well have added, "let him take the horse-shed." This seems to have been the prevailing sentiment in that staunch temperance town, Oberlin, Ohio. Years ago a Doctor of Divinity smoker, who was passing a few days there, found himself out of cigars. After a long hunt in search of them, he was directed to a hostler, who might, perhaps, supply him. He sought him out and obtained a cigar, but when told that he must go behind the stable to smoke, he had such a sense of shame that from that time he forsook the indulgence.

Not so apt disciples were two New England ministers, who, being at the same place at a convention some years later, walked down the railway track for their daily smoke.

It is not uncommon to find among temperance lecturers ardent devotees of the weed. A total abstainer, yet a tobacco sot! We have suffered quite enough from these demi-semi-reformers. Our parlors and our chambers, our halls and our sanctuaries are often desecrated by their performances. "Why don't you use the church for your temperance addresses, and devote to the cause the money you spend in hiring a hall?"

"Oh, it would never do, the church is so fearfully defiled by these lecturers."

When such men come out from a smoke-room, pallid, trembling, and bearing the nauseous signs of the indulgence, instead of mounting the platform to exhort others to temperance, would it not be more fitting that they should take the back seat, and listen in silence and humiliation? "Thou that sayest another shall not 'drink,' dost thou smoke or chew?"

"Tobacco demoralizes," says Dr. Parker. "It makes a man careless about his hair; he lets his nails go uncleaned; his clothes are soiled—in a word he is dirty."

A writer in Blackwood asserts that "tobacco is the favorite filth of every savage life within the circumference of the globe; that it fills the atmosphere of the continent with a perpetual stench; . . . that it is, in its own nature, the filthiest, most foolish, dullest, and most disgusting practice on the face of the earth."

Why cannot the civil trespass law be brought to bear on this matter? Our statutes forbid that any man shall, from greed of gain, or to gratify an unnatural appetite, cause a nuisance in any public place where all have equal rights and a common interest. Is not the wide-spread use of tobacco a nuisance so offensive, so unwholesome, that, if suddenly sprung upon the community, there would be a spontaneous uprising, an indignant mass-meeting, which would demand its immediate expulsion? No pipe or cigar ought to be smoked within a thousand yards of a church or place of public gathering. Cannot the early New England statute be revived, at least so far as to impose a fine on any person using this weed publicly?

In 1818 the following Acts concerning smoking were passed in the metropolis of New England, and recorded among the city ordinances:—

"Every person who shall smoke, or have in his or her possession any lighted pipe or cigar, in any street, lane, or passageway, or on any wharf, in said city, shall forfeit and pay, for each and every offense, the sum of two dollars."

"And, further, if any person shall have in his or her possession, in any ropewalk, or barn, or stable, any fire, lighted pipe, or cigar, the person so offending shall forfeit and pay, for each offense, a sum not exceeding one hundred dollars nor less than twenty dollars."

The first of these acts was never enforced, and, having remained on the statute book for more than sixty years a dead letter, in 1880 was repealed.

The second, which is a law absolutely necessary as a precaution of safety, is still in force in Boston, and ought to be in every city, town, and hamlet throughout the land. But it simply contemplates protection against danger. When shall we take higher ground?—Christian at Work.