III. Deceptive in Operation.
Tobacco is productive of more evil because of its deceptive, subtle, underhanded mode of operation. Listen to the strong evidence on this point: Remember, TOBACCO IS THE FIRST STEP IN INTEMPERANCE. Jerry McAuley claimed that no drunkard ever reformed permanently unless he abandoned the use of tobacco. Tobacco is used, and used freely, and by great numbers, because it is a deadener of sensibilities. It helps to take the raw edge off life and feelings. Tobacco is comforting and soothing, benumbing nerve and brain and rendering them somewhat less conscious. Tobacco is murdering many a lad. "Where they do not fairly kill, cigarettes are the devil's kindling-wood. They start a craving for stimulants that liquor is the quickest to meet." Mrs. E. G. White says: "Tobacco is a slow, insidious, but most malignant poison. In whatever form it is used, it tells upon the constitution. It is all the more dangerous because its effects are slow, and at first hardly perceptible." Mary Foote-Henderson has said: "Undoubtedly tobacco should take the lead as the greatest of human destroyers, for its influence is the most destructive. It is less brutal, less violent, less noisy, less stupefying, less maudlin, less besotted, than alcohol. It does not madden or murder. . . . Compared with opium, tobacco is less annihilating and less torturing. It does not stretch its victim on the rack. Its effect is soothing. It apparently helps to think, to act, to live. It is social and genial. It is convenient. . . . A man knows when he is drunk with alcohol or opium, but he does not know his nicotin until the accumulating effects have made themselves permanent; until he finds the entire being of his fabric undermined." Thousands of boys are killed every year by cigarettes. They are deceived. They do not commit suicide deliberately. We quote from Dr. David Paulson: "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." Tobacco is productive of more evil in the world than alcohol on the ground that it is a greater curse to national life. "The conscience of America is keener, more alert, and better educated than that of nations in which people of all ages and both sexes indulge in cigaret-smoking. This is among the blessings vouchsafed to us from our glorious past." "All that is undesirable in character seems to follow in the train of this vice [tobacco], which is believed to have had no small part in bringing Spain down from the commanding position she once occupied among the nations of the world. . . . The people of our climate, with our high-strung temperament, can not withstand the ravages of this pernicious and unnatural indulgence." Tobacco, like cocain or morphin, blunts the moral perceptions and demoralizes the entire being. To ascertain the real injury to the race from such a habit, we must necessarily go to the third and fourth generations. We have reached that time, and the results of the tobacco habit are now fully manifest. As Sir Benjamin Brodie says, "No evils are so manifestly visited upon the third and fourth generations as the evils which spring from the use of tobacco." John Ruskin has said: "It is not easy to estimate the demoralizing effect on the youth of Europe of the cigar." The late Canon Stowell said: "It is frightful to think what a canker is eating into the vitals of the nation, blighting its young men, squandering its resources, undermining its health, and depraving its morals."