ABOMINABLE AND DANGEROUS.
A GENTLEMAN, fond of good cigars, says in the New York Times: "A prominent physician told me lately that, from the practice of cigar makers wetting the wrapper with their saliva and biting the end of the cigar into shape, a spread of syphilitic disease was taking place; that he knew of several cases. Somewhat alarmed, I managed to visit a number of factories. Two-thirds of the cigar makers, I found, daub the whole end of the cigar with their saliva. Thinking that Cuban workmen might not do it, I visited places where they were employed, and found that not only did they use their saliva to make the wrapper stick, but that most of them before wrapping bit the end of the cigar into shape with their teeth. As the physician informs me that many of the cigar makers have sore mouths from disease, it is a dangerous habit." In New York great numbers of cigars are made in cheap tenement houses. In one small room the poor cigar maker and his family live, sleep, and work. The leaf tobacco is spread and moistened on the filthy floor, walked on by the women, children, cats, and dogs. Then it is made into cigars. These are finely perfumed, given a popular Spanish brand, and sold at extravagant prices as a first-class luxury. Those who chew fine-cut occasionally find in it old dried-up quids which have been worn out by some careless or covetous chewer. Some kinds of smoking tobacco are made, wholly or in part, of refuse tobacco quids and stumps of cigars which have been gathered by children from sidewalks, gutters, and spittoons. Cigarettes are also made of this tobacco garbage, tobacco stems, opium, and paper containing a large percentage of arsenic and other deadly poison. In San Francisco one finds boys who are breaking out about the mouth with leprosy from smoking cigarettes made by Chinese lepers. Smoking produces dyspepsia, diseases of the liver, paleness, sallowness, weakness, inability to procreation, indolence, paralysis, congestion of the brain, blindness, cancer of the mouth, tongue, and lips, and early death. Dr. Pidduch says: "In no instance is the sin of the father more strikingly visited upon the children than in the sin of tobacco smoking; the enervation, the hysteria, the insanity, the dwarfish deformities, the consumption, the suffering lives and early deaths of the children of inveterate smokers, bear ample testimony to the feebleness and unsoundness of the constitution transmitted by this pernicious habit." Smoking is far below beasthood. The lamb or pig that smoked would be treated as a nuisance. Could dogs be induced to imitate their masters, smoke and chew at home, in the streets, stores, saloons, etc., flavoring everything with tobacco filth, what a shocking exhibition it would be of cruelty to animals; but if mankind would only imitate the dogs in their disuse of tobacco and intoxicants, to what sublime height our race would be elevated, what measureless happiness and prosperity would follow such a glorious reform! How holy angels must wonder at the folly of those fiendish smoke stacks who court disease, while they glory in their shame, fancying their superior manhood because they smoke a filthy poison!—Tract.