Crippling the Boys

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Mar 19, 1912

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 39, No. 12.

Crippling the Boys

ONE of the worst agencies, if not the very worst, for crippling our boys is the cigaret, and the habit is growing alarmingly. Ten billion cigarets a year are smoked in the United States, or an average of over a hundred for each man, woman, and child in the whole nation. When it is taken into account that there are millions of children who are too young to smoke, and that there are many other millions who do not use the cigaret, it is shown that some people are using a very great number of them.

The habit does its greatest evil among boys. Once it is formed it grows on them very rapidly, and soon destroys their vitality by breaking down their nervous energy. Boys who form the habit early, seldom have enough ambition left to complete the grammar grades in school.

The cigaret, and the use of tobacco in all its various forms, together with the drink curse, are reaching out with fiendish hands in every direction for the manhood of the world. The use of tobacco and the use of liquors are twin evils that are alarmingly on the increase. They are the great leaders that are drawing their millions into the attendant vices and crimes that curse the age.

The evils that are brought into the physical life through the use of tobacco and alcoholic drinks are very bad indeed, but they are almost as nothing when compared with the moral wreckage that these twin destroyers produce. And altho these facts can be demonstrated, yet there is an army of men who insist on manufacturing and distributing these body-and-soul-destroying commodities, and all for the sake of making money. They would seem to say: "What do I care how many boys are ruined! I have a good chance to make money by cultivating and intensifying their depraved appetites, and I am going to make the money, no matter what the cost in wrecking the health and morals of the boys and men of the nation and of the world."

The outlook for the conversion of the world and the much-talked-of millennium is not very bright while there is such a vast number who insist on making their money by educating the rising generation to drink and smoke and revel in the other vices and crimes that attend these twin evils. Any one who will calmly look at actual facts, and refuse to be led away by gushing sophistries, can readily see that the apostle spoke the truth when he said that "evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse," until Christ comes back to earth in person to put an end to the reign of sin.

The divine Book holds out no hope of saving this whole world, or that it ever will all turn to Christ. Our hope and our aim must be to reach the individual and to save as many as we can. And if there was ever a time when fathers and mothers should be wide awake to guard their little boys and girls, that time is now. They should most faithfully teach them in their tenderest years, of the evils that beset them at every step. It is only in this way that they may hope to save them from the ruin of mind and heart and body that is beckoning them on all sides.