Health and Temperance by Joseph Cook

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · May 14, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 19.

Health and Temperance.

By Joseph Cook

The Tobacco Plague.

“WHAT are said to be the causes of General Grant’s present illness?”

This question you will excuse, because it has been forced upon me. The nation has unmeasured attachment to that great hero, whose dangerous illness it now mourns. We know that he was an instrument of Providence in securing the overthrow of slavery. It is acutely distressing to us to contemplate any spot on the sun of his civic and military and personal career. I, personally, believe General Grant to be a man of lofty moral nature, and of intense ethical convictions. But I have been urged not to evade this question, because the solemnity of the facts which have been stated by medical men of great eminence is such that they ought to be noticed.

We are told by his physicians that General Grant’s present illness was largely caused by excessive smoking. I am not a fanatic, I hope, on the topic of tobacco, opium, or chloral, any more than on that of intoxicating liquors; but as we are now in several commonwealths requiring compulsory scientific instruction of the youth of the land as to the mischiefs of both strong drinks and narcotics, and as it is useless so to instruct youth while the leaders of society set an evil example, I excuse myself, and hope you will excuse me for directing public attention to the testimony of these physicians.

I sit in the railway coaches and at hotel tables, and hear the example of some foremost preacher in London, or of a foremost preacher in one American city or another, quoted in defense of the abundant and habitual use of tobacco. I suppose that physicians will grant that there are a few, perhaps five out of 1,000, who can use tobacco with impunity for a long period of years. But they tell us, also, that the most serious dangers are connected with an excessive use of it, and I think we are all ready to admit that with the young the habit is extremely dangerous.

Germany, in several of her provinces, is arresting on her streets the children who smoke. We know what our own schools for military training and for the education of seamen have been doing of late in this matter. We know what strong resolutions have been passed in some of the great religious gatherings, especially in the vast and aggressive Methodist Church, which may Heaven bless for its crusade against the filthy weed! There is a rising sentiment on the right side of this topic, and why should we not listen to the voice of Providence when it calls our attention pointedly to a great mischief?

When a man in the pulpit, however, sets the example of the use of tobacco to the young in his congregation, must we not lament the fact? Is it not time to lament it in public? Is it not time to ask the revered men who set a bad example in this particular in high places in God’s church, to look at what Providence is doing in this country? A great historic character is likely to be cut off twenty years before the time at which he might otherwise have gone from us, simply because of excess in a habit which, to all who have not learned to like it, is loathsome. One of his staff has had a cancer taken out of his lip, and it originated from a similar cause. The records of the medical profession detail scores of such cases. Emily Faithful says that Americans are very courteous to ladies; but she hints delicately that an American who will take off his hat in an elevator, for fear of being discourteous to a lady, will often, in the same elevator, expectorate or smoke tobacco in her presence. We tolerate in men, habits that we would not in dogs.—Joseph Cook, in the Independent.