Health and Temperance

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · May 27, 1889

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 15, No. 20.

Health and Temperance.

AN INSIDIOUS POISON.

ONE of the most pernicious evils of civilization is one that is doing infinite harm, and yet which attracts comparatively little attention, except now and then from an occasional physician, or some other expert, each of whom is regarded as a crank.

Whisky and all other kinds of alcoholic stimulants do attract notice for the reason that their evil results, when excess is indulged in, become conspicuously apparent. They flush the complexion, they redden and swell the nose, they blear the eyes, bloat the liver, inflame the stomach, derange the nervous system, and impair the qualities of the brain. These effects are so marked that they cannot escape notice, and hence the abuse of alcohol is regarded as a supreme evil, and is made the subject of repressive and reformatory action throughout all civilization.

After something of the same kind is the opium habit. It forces itself upon the notice of the world by its rapid development of destructive symptoms. It produces in the victim excessive exaltation, alternated by a frightful depression. The necessity of larger doses of the drug incessantly increases; the periods of felicity in heaven grow constantly shorter and those in hell more extended, until there comes a time when death, or worse, idiocy, puts an end to the disease. On account of palpable developments the opium mania is brought within the notice of the world, and is the object of widespread and earnest reformatory action.

The tobacco habit differs from others in an essential particular. It is slow moving and insidious beyond comprehension. Alcohol and morphine no sooner enter the human system than danger signals at once give notice of the presence of the enemy. Not so with the nicotine mania. It exists for years without giving the least warning. It is the slowest, the subtlest, the most deadly of poisons. Somewhat like the fabled vampire, it soothes its prey with the caressing kisses of its wings while it sucks the life-blood from its veins.

The evils of the tobacco habit only begin to be felt long after they have become incurable and the mischief is already accomplished. Difficult as it may be to break the chains of the inebriate or of the opium eater, those which pinion the confirmed smoker are capable of infinitely greater resistance. There are reformed drunkards, here and there, and now and then is to be met a man who has been redeemed from the slavery of the poppy; the cases of those who have ever been emancipated from the tobacco mania are of the rarest occurrence.

Long before the victim suspects that there is anything wrong in his condition; long before he knows there is an enemy in the vicinity, the work of investment is completed. He suddenly discovers that his memory is not as retentive as it has been, and in reading, and in listening to a speaker, he finds by degrees that he does not comprehend what he hears and sees with distinctness. He finds himself subject to moments of impatience; he is irritable; events which once caused him no pain now afflict him grievously. His appetite decreases, his digestion is impaired, his heart takes on an irregular pulsation, he is startled at the most trivial surprise, and worse than all else, there rises in his brain a fog-like exhalation which obscures its clearness and obliterates the pathway of thought.

All these developments have come without warning. He studies them. He never learns that he is suffering from nicotine infusion. It is malaria, the weather, the climate, the east wind, heredity; it is never tobacco. He is overworked, he needs a vacation, a rest, and all the while he inhales the deadening vapor whose malign influence is the cause of all his ills.

For the reason that tobacco is so insidious in its action and destructive in its ultimate effects; for the further reason that, unlike alcohol and opium, it is sought for by mere children, and often begins its work in the immature nerves and tissues of the young, and thus materially enlarges its area of action, it is far more deadly than either of the others.

The pulpits, legislation, reformers, and philanthropists are failing in their duty in not denouncing with all their might an evil which is doing more than any other one to undermine American civilization.—Chicago Herald.

IF intemperance were a new evil, coming in upon us for the first time like a pestilence from some foreign shore, laden with its awful burden of disease, of pauperism and crime, with what horror would the nation contemplate its monstrous approach! What severity of laws, what stringencies of quarantine, what activities of resistance, would be suddenly aroused! But, alas! it is no new evil. It surrounds us like an atmosphere, as it has our fathers through countless generations. It perverts judgments, it poisons habits, it sways passions, it taints churches and tears consciences. It seizes the enginery of our legislation, and by it creates a moral phenomenon of perpetual motion, which nature denies to physics; for it licenses and empowers itself to beget in endless rounds, the wrongs, vices, and crimes which society is organized to prevent; and—worst of all for our country—it encoils parties like the serpents of Laocoon, and crushes in its folds the spirit of patriotism and virtue.—New York Tribune.