Temperance | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jul 26, 1883

Temperance.

An Old Man on Tobacco.

The Lever gives the following report of a temperance speech:—

George W. Clark spoke last Sunday evening in the M. E. Church, on "Tobacco and its Effects." The speaker opened the service by prayer, followed by a song and a Scriptural reading. After asking the privilege of sitting down while addressing the audience—he being somewhat infirm and weary—proceeded to say that the common and prevalent use of this Indian weed is most irrational, illogical, and unphysiological, whether chewed, snuffed, or smoked. It is a gross perversion of manhood, and a gross perversion of the weed, and no valid reason can be given to justify or excuse this habit or mania of tobacco using. Nicotine contains no nutriment, supplies no waste or want of the physical system. It neither antidotes nor cures disease, nor aids the intellectual powers. It is no friend to moral purity nor religious spirituality, and on no rational theory can its use be justified or excused. I do not say it is good for nothing, for it is an active poison, and may be used successfully as an exterminator of flies, moths, bugs, ticks, etc., and is an infallible remedy for lice on lousy cattle, and for killing fleas on dogs. Give it its due. Doctors administer it to prostrate the physical forces in men and animals, and it does it most effectually. So poisonous is it that one drachm of nicotine is equal to the same amount of prussic acid. The smallest drop it is possible to hold on the head of a pin, when placed on the nose of a mouse will throw it into spasms and kill it.

The refuse of a quid, after the juice has all been extracted, if swallowed by the habitual user of the weed would make him sicker than the whale was when he tossed Jonah on dry land. It contains the very breath of disease, and produces blindness, deafness, rheumatism, idiocy, apoplexy, paralysis, and many other ills. Cases of violent death from tobacco paralysis are becoming alarmingly frequent, and a large per cent. of the sudden deaths now occurring are attributable either directly or indirectly to the use of tobacco. Cancers on the lips and mouth are becoming more frequent every day.

Many a poor, sickly woman, who is supposed to be dying of consumption, is in reality pining away from the effects of inhaling her sweet husband's tobacco-poisoned breath. Tobacco throws off two of the most deadly gases known, viz., carbonic oxide and carbonic acid gas, and few husbands and fathers realize how they are endangering the health and lives of their children and wives by filling their homes, their offices, and their stores with this vile, poisonous smoke. Men on the street go puffing it into the face of the lady with whom they are riding or walking. What would they think of a lady who would be guilty of such a breach of manners?

Another evidence that it is not fit to use is that it makes every one deathly sick when they first begin using it. The speaker referred to his own experience, and thanked God that he had been led to stop its use before it had become a confirmed habit. It creates a thirst for strong drink by exhausting the saliva which was placed in the mouth to assist digestion. He did not say that every one who uses tobacco becomes addicted to strong drink, but many of them do. It is acknowledged that not many of our women die suddenly, and not many of them, especially our northern women, now use tobacco. The southern women have a most disgusting habit of "dipping," and one house in New York manufactures one hundred barrels of the strongest kind of Scotch snuff a month, especially for this southern trade; but as a rule, women do not use tobacco in any form.

Why should our animal economy, which naturally revolts at the use of it, be subjected to such violations? Man has no right to entail on his offspring the evil effects consequent upon its use. We should never forget that inexorable but infinitely wise law of retribution. "The iniquity of the father shall be visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation." It brings young men and boys into bad company. Smoking, drinking, rowdyism, and crime, are almost always inseparable. Take a drink and take a cigar are synonymous terms. The wooden Indian with his handful of wooden cigars, and the bloated Bacchus grinning over his favorite glass, go hand in hand, and stand side by side, upon every business street, fitting "signs" of the barbarism and brutality that reigns within. You seldom find a man who argues that the use of tobacco does any good. Nicotine feeds disease instead of healing it. It reduces its dupes to the most abject slavery. Alcohol victims are not more firmly bound. Many is the man who has endeavored to break off the habit, and finally given up in despair and died a driveling slave.