CIGARETTE SMOKING by Christian Union

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · May 12, 1890

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 16, No. 18.

CIGARETTE SMOKING.

By Christian Union

WE think that the little city of Frankfort, in Kentucky, deserves no small praise for one thing its authorities have recently done. A law has there been enacted, with the purpose of enforcing it, too, that cigarettes shall no longer be sold in the corporation! Certainly a bold move, especially in a tobacco-raising State, and one that deserves universal imitation. The smoking of tobacco in any form is injurious to health, and even prejudicial to morals, but the cigarette is particularly to be denounced. The smoke of the medicated paper-wrap, combined with that of the deleterious weed, is usually inhaled so as to be passed measurably into the lungs before being breathed forth again into the poisoned air. And thus it immediately and directly introduces the seeds of insidious disease and death. The cigarette ought everywhere to be prohibited, if the young lads of our country, who are giving themselves up to the habit of smoking the killing nuisance, and who have not sense enough to do otherwise, would be preserved to reach a manhood of something like vigor. But of all people, our law-makers have the least moral courage when a real evil is to be dealt with; so that we are hardly able to hope that the Frankfort example will be generally followed. Public opinion must be relied upon; and yet this is itself permeated, so to speak, with the fumes of both cigarette and cigar, to say nothing of all sorts of pipes.—Christian Union.