[A Paper Read at the Mutual Edification Club, Feb. 8, 1908.]
IT is not the thieves who are discovered, arrested, and imprisoned, who are doing the harm to the world and to society, but those who are permitted to walk at large, undiscovered, unarrested, and unimprisoned. And is not this preeminently true of tobacco? Whoever heard of any one being ostracized from society because he smoked too much? No; he is welcome everywhere in society. Even young ladies encourage him. They like the smell of it, they say, and the evil being thus condoned has more opportunity to do its deadly, contaminating work. He goes on from year to year demoralizing every pure and noble impulse within himself, and victimizing every pure thing that lies within his pathway. Note the face of that young boy who is just beginning the use of the cigaret, and watch him deteriorate from year to year. He loses all trace of purity and manhood—and his face is a true index to his character.
And then again, May we not reasonably believe that the use of tobacco lays by far the larger part of the foundation for liquor-using? Scarcely will you find a man who is addicted to the use of liquor who has not first used tobacco in some form, and thus formed his taste for strong drink; for the very papers in which the cigarets are wrapped, it is said, are soaked in alcohol, in order to develop a taste for the drug worse than alcohol.
Because of this insidious seed-sowing in the youth, tobacco becomes more productive of evil than alcohol. The Hon. George Torrance, superintendent of the Illinois State Reformatory, declares: “The cigaret is doing more harm than the saloon.” I trust that you will note that it is the cigaret alone that is doing more harm than the saloon, and then, if we include the cigar, the pipe, chewing tobacco, and snuff, what an overwhelming evil we have in the weed!
Dr. Torrance continues: “At the Edinburg Reformatory of eighty boys, there was not one who had not been a smoker or a chewer, and most of them had been both. In the reformatory at Blakely, near Manchester, out of thirty boys who had been admitted, twelve had been smokers, eight chewers, and ten confessed to have stolen tobacco or money with which to buy it.”
Another writer says: “There is overwhelming evidence to show that juvenile smoking is an evil of the first magnitude—an evil which is sapping our boyhood's strength and undermining our national manhood.” Over one hundred million cigarets are sold weekly in the United Kingdom in penny packets alone, besides those made by the user.
One prominent physician, who has made an especial study of the question, declares: “Of all the traps the devil has set for our young people nothing pulls them down so quickly and surely as the cigaret. Alcohol does not begin to equal it. And this man's testimony could be supplemented by many others.
Think of the hundreds and thousands of boys in our fair land who use tobacco before they are old enough to use liquor, before liquor dealers are allowed to sell it to them, but who everywhere—on the street, in their homes, in high society, and even among clergymen and church pastors, have the example set before them.
To Others than Users.
You already know how tobacco blunts the moral sensibilities and deadens the keen, quick powers of perception. Then can you not see how its extensive use is doing untold evil to millions of people, not only to the users of the poison themselves, but to all who come within the reach of their influence? It is working stealthily and surely, undermining health, morals, and society, and subtly eating its way into everything good in the nation and in the character.
Oftentimes wives are poisoned by close contact with the effluvia of tobacco-sodden husbands. Many are the children and babies who have died from nicotin poisoning caused by breathing the atmosphere contaminated by tobacco-using parents—for women are not exempt from this evil. For years some of them have used it in England and in this country; English girls are taking it up and smoking with their young men. And now we read of society women in our own near city of San Francisco, sitting in the public cafes, puffing at a cigar or a cigaret.
Think of it all! What a train of evils follows in the wake of this filthy habitat—physical degeneracy of every sort, insanity, for I could cite you to cases where the brain has been literally burned up, eaten away, and could tell you of instances where boys have smoked as many as fifty cigarets a day.
The head nurse of the Minnesota insane asylum said: “It is astonishing the number of women who come to us who have become insane by smoking cigarets.” And this in the great Northwest where the vice has not secured as firm a foothold as in many other places! What of our crowded cities the world over?
Cancer is increasing to an alarming extent, much of it due to smoking. And right here I might mention that one of our greatest generals, U. S. Grant, was a victim to this awful disease, but he is only one in many.
Blindness, immorality, and scores of other evils may all be traced to the corrupting, contaminating, debilitating, demoralizing, devitalizing effects of this baneful, poisonous, narcotizing, filthy weed, this deteriorating, contemptible, despicable habit which leaves only the mere outline of a man or a woman. KATHRINA BLOSSOM WILCOX.