Health and Temperance

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jan 7, 1886

Health and Temperance.

Some Facts about Tobacco.

WHATEVER honest difference of opinion may exist about the ethics of the tobacco question, there can be no doubt that the consumption of the weed in its various forms lays an enormous burden on the people of this country in money expenditure. The report of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue for the last year indicates that about 3,500,000,000 cigars, 1,000,000,000 cigarettes, and 170,000,000 pounds of chewing tobacco were consumed in the United States in the single year 1884. A writer in the Inter-Ocean, from which we take these statistics, calculates that it would take one man 40,000 years simply to count, one by one, the cigars smoked in that year. The estimate would allow twenty-four pounds of tobacco a year to every family. When we consider that a fifteen-cent cigar represents about two cents' worth of tobacco and one cent's worth of labor, and that the total tobacco bill of the country mounts up to nearly $500,000,000, it is not to be wondered at that the economist should exclaim in amazement at the waste, and wonder if the alleged "soothing and tranquillizing" influence is worth what it costs.

A book has just been printed on this subject, in which the author, "Meta Lander" (Mrs. Margaret Woods Lawrence) has collected with great industry and thoroughness a mass of facts and opinions on the use of tobacco, in which arguments are brought to bear with great force against it from the financial, the social, the physical, the aesthetic, the intellectual, and the moral standpoints. Our readers may be interested in a few paragraphs:—

WHAT IT COSTS.

"Some years since, the annual production of tobacco throughout the world was estimated at four billions of pounds. This mass, if transformed into roll-tobacco, two inches in diameter, would coil around the world sixty times; or, if made up into tablets, as sailors use it, would form a pile as high as an Egyptian pyramid. Allowing the cost of the unmanufactured material to be ten cents a pound, the yearly expense of this poisonous growth amounts to $400,000,000. Put into marketable shape, the annual cost reaches $1,000,000,000. This sum, according to careful computation, would construct two railroads around the earth, at $50,000 a mile. It would build 100,000 churches, each costing $10,000, or 500,000 school-houses, each costing $2,000; or, it would employ a million of preachers and a million of teachers, at a salary of $500.

"What more effective, pathetic appeal to the head and the heart can be made than by these figures? Two millions of tons of tobacco annually consumed by smokers and snuffers and chewers; while from every part of the habitable globe are hands stretched out imploringly for the bread of life which must be denied for the lack of means to send it!

"In Great Britain alone there are not far from 300,000 tobacco shops. England prohibits the culture of the weed, that she may secure larger imports, her annual receipts amounting to $40,000,000, a greater revenue than she gets from all the gold mines of Australia.

"In Austria the duties from this source reach the same figures; while in France, where tobacco is a monopoly, they come up to $60,000,000. In most countries official statements show that it costs more than bread.

"In the city of New York about 75,000,000 cigars are annually consumed, and at a cost of more than $9,000,000—enough cigars to build a wall from Empire City to Albany."

DANGER TO PROPERTY.

"It is stated by Dr. Ritchie that in London fifty-three fires occurred in one year as the result of smoking. He adds: 'I have more than once seen a carpenter under a London station light his pipe and cast the half-burnt match among the shavings.'

"What shall we say to the setting on fire of a forest near Lowell, Mass., by ministerial cigars? to the burning of several buildings in Fall River from juvenile cigars and matches? to the consuming of a church in Chicago from a carpenter's pipe? and to the destruction of three millions' worth of property in one of our cities from a half-smoked cigar, which a young man threw down?"

"So infatuated are the devotees of the weed that, in spite of the strictest regulations, workmen sometimes persist in smoking even amid the most dangerous surroundings.

"In a single day pipes and matches were found in the pockets of fifty-eight workmen as they were just entering the powder works at Hounslow.

"The blowing up of a powder magazine in Mexico, and many houses near by, with the destruction of seventy lives, was caused by the dropping of a lighted cigar.

"After the Blantyre explosion in 1879, resulting in the death of twenty-eight persons, the inspector of mines found matches and partly smoked pipes lying near the bodies.

"Says an insurance agent: 'One-third or more of all the fires in my circuit have originated from matches and pipes. Fires in England and America are being kindled with alarming frequency by smokers casting about their firebrands or half-burnt matches.'"

LITERARY MEN AND TOBACCO.

"Among the total abstainers on principle from tobacco as well as from spirits and wine, are Dr. Allibone, the Duke of Argyll, Robert and William Chambers, George W. Childs, Professor Fairbairn, Cardinal Newman, Keshub Chunder Sen, and M. Barthélemy St. Hilaire.

"Of Gladstone it is affirmed that he 'detests smoking.'

"Darwin: 'I have taken snuff all my life, and regret that I ever acquired the habit.'

"Ernst Haeckel: 'I have never smoked.'

"Philip Gilbert Hamerton: 'I shall certainly never resume smoking. I never use any stimulants whatever when writing, and believe the use of them to be most pernicious; indeed, I have seen terrible results from them. When a writer feels dull, the best stimulant is fresh air.'

"John Ruskin entirely abhors the practice of smoking, his dislike of it being mainly based on the belief that a cigar or pipe will often make a man content to be idle for any length of time.

"Charles Reade: 'I tried to smoke five or six times, but it always made me heavy and rather sick; therefore, as it costs money, I spurned it. I have seen many people the worse for it. I never saw anybody perceptibly the better for it.'

"The case of a distinguished French savant, the Abé Moigno, editor of the Journal du Monde, is very striking. Temperate in his general habits, he became conscious of injury from his excessive use of snuff, many times giving it up only to resume it again. He was a noted linguist, knowing by heart some 1,500 root words in various languages; but, under the influence of the narcotic, these were all dropping from his memory. He felt this to be so great a trial that he finally renounced the habit. He writes: 'It was the commencement of a veritable resurrection of health, mind, and memory, and the army of words that had run away has gradually returned.'"—Christian Union.