TOWARD THE ABYSS | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Oct 28, 1897

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 23, No. 42.

TOWARD THE ABYSS.

A PHILADELPHIA tobacconist says: "One-fifth of our cigaret sales during the last two months have been to women." He further declares that in that city there is a certain club of up-town girls, a smokers' club, which to his personal knowledge recently passed a resolution adopting this particular brand as the official cigaret of the club.

It is, alas! not improbable that smoking is spreading among young women of wealth and social leadership, and among the more numerous class that are on tiptoe straining up to reach that circle, and, failing to do so, aping it to the best of their ability. Nor is this the worst: the habit of drinking wines and strong liquors in excess is spreading among them. In a certain city there are twenty-four young married couples, all in good society, that frequently associate together socially and constantly, for card-playing purposes. They all drink such liquors as their husbands drink, and nearly all smoke in the presence of the gentlemen, and with them. In part this tendency is imported from continental Europe, but in large measure it is the fruit of an impulse to ape everything that men do, which appears to have infected the minds of many women. That such habits as smoking, gambling, and drinking affect the average woman more strongly for evil than the average man is a fact having its roots in physiology. That one of the results of such habits is to relax the fibers of those virtues which are most essential to woman, and with which she is credited to a higher degree than men, is self-evident; and the harvest of such sowing may be expected, and, in fact, has already arrived, in the revelations of the divorce courts of the infelicities of the domestic state in high life.—Christian Advocate.