Health and Temperance by Mary Clement Leavitt

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Feb 17, 1890

Health and Temperance.

By Mary Clement Leavitt

A LETTER ON TOBACCO.

THE old school-teachers in Boston began to notice some years ago that there were more pupils with imperfect sight than formerly. After a most searching examination into the facts of the case, reaching ten thousand pupils of these schools, it was shown that boys who used tobacco had poorer sight than others; that those who used it, and whose fathers used it, had the poorest sight of all, and that even girls whose fathers were smokers had not as good sight as those who were entirely separated from it.

Injury to the sight goes so far that many persons have become blind in middle life, their physicians declaring that the blindness is caused by the smoking of tobacco.

Very recently I met with the declaration in an English paper that a constantly-increasing number of cases of blindness and oncoming blindness were being received into the hospitals in London, which the physicians declare are caused by tobacco. This injury to the sight is of the utmost importance to young people.

Of scarcely less importance is another evil effect, namely, a dulling influence on the mental faculties. This is so well established that the French Government has forbidden all pupils in its schools to use tobacco in any form.

No user of tobacco has ever taken the first rank and highest honors at Harvard, the oldest and largest university in America. It has been observed in the Boston schools that scholarship declines when boys begin to use tobacco.

A fact pointing in the same direction was mentioned to me last June in Burmah, by the master of a large boys' school there. The master had tried to induce the pupils to give up tobacco, with considerable success, but his efforts had been hindered by the best scholar in the school.

This lad was an inveterate smoker, and declared that in himself was a proof that tobacco did not hurt the mind. Presently, however, in order to please his teacher, he stopped smoking, with the result that he got on so much better in all his studies that he and all who observed the case were convinced that tobacco had hindered even this brilliant boy.

Because of the facts stated above, the Russian Government imprisons any boy under sixteen found using tobacco in any form.

Four of the United States have forbidden anybody to sell tobacco to children under sixteen, or anyone but the parent or guardian to give it to them.

India's young people have, of course, learned that all the processes of life go on through the action of the brain and other parts of the nervous system. We cannot speak, or walk, or digest our food, or breathe except through the agency of the nervous system.

It is apparent, then, that if this system is impaired something of a lasting nature will go wrong. Now tobacco has a deleterious effect upon the nerves, and it is, accompanied at the Naval School at Annapolis, United States, and one-fifth of all are rejected on account of heart disease, which the physicians say is caused by the use of tobacco.

Cancer of the mouth and throat is often caused by tobacco. General Grant, of America, died in this way. The latest advices from Germany state that the crown prince is suffering in the same way, from the same cause, and that the same result is feared. (The crown prince became the Emperor Frederic and died of tobacco cancer after this was written.)

The following evils are now known to result from the use of tobacco:—

Growth is hindered.
Sight is injured and often destroyed.
Neuralgia, dizziness, and indigestion are caused.
The action of the heart is disturbed, causing irritability of that organ, and consequently a tremulous hand and unsteady pulse.
The mental faculties are dulled and thus intellectual work is hindered.
Irritation of the mouth and throat is produced, and thus the purity of the voice is destroyed, and also cancer in the throat and mouth is caused.

It is well for India's young people to consider whether money paid for cigars could not be better spent in some other way. The cost of a cigar is not much, but when several in a day are used for each of the three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, and for fifteen, twenty, thirty, or forty years, it becomes a very considerable sum.

A man whom I know, living within ten miles of my own home, left off smoking about twenty years ago, when about twenty years old, from purely economical reasons. He had a curiosity to know how much the cigar money would amount to, and made the calculation to cover a period of twenty years.

To his surprise it was sufficient to build a comfortable house. He therefore determined to put a sum equal to that he had been in the habit of spending weekly for cigars into the savings bank every Saturday.

A few years passed, and the money, with accumulations of interest, was sufficient to build a small house. This he planned as a wing of a large structure. He married and lived in the "tobacco house," as he often laughingly called it. Again the years rolled by, the small sum going into the savings bank every Saturday night, until not many years back he completed the original plan by building the main part of the house.

It now contains nine good rooms, and all the furniture of the new portion, as well as the entire house, has been paid for with money that would have gone off in tobacco smoke had he not taken that good resolution. This man is a clerk in a mercantile house. If he had not saved his money he would have been obliged to pay rent.

The rent money has been saved and invested, and now, as a large family are needing education, and fitting for some years hence, were he to renounce tobacco, and conscientiously put aside the money saved.

When I was a young girl at school we used to sustain a fortnightly paper, one column of which was headed "Definitions." In this column appeared many apt and funny things. One item ran as follows,—"Cigar: A roll of tobacco with fire at one end and a fool at the other."

But I have left the highest motive I can urge against tobacco to the last, and this is responsibility to God.

God has given us these wonderful bodies, these wonderful faculties, all capable of high and noble uses. Is it right to take the money God gives us, and which he declares belongs to himself, and use it for such ignoble purposes?—Mary Clement Leavitt, in India's Young Folks.