Social Effects of Tobacco.
By Dr. Gibbons
EVERY individual owes to society a certain degree of attention to his personal appearance. He has no right to make himself repulsive to those with whom he comes in contact. He has no right to make himself a nuisance. There is virtue in cleanliness and neatness. Of all habits to which men are addicted, none so conduces to slovenliness, and to a disregard of the comfort of others, as the use of tobacco. We have known young men who were scrupulously neat in person and attire when they commenced, and who for a long time chewed so moderately and cautiously that few of their friends detected them. We have seen the same individuals a few years afterwards with the black streak in the corners of their mouth, and the black stains on their garments. As chewers and smokers grow careless in person, they become indifferent to those obligations toward others which are enjoined by common politeness. Cautious at first not to offend in smoking or spitting, they gradually abandon restraint, and finally lose altogether that nice sense of propriety which marks the true gentleman in all the relations of life. We knew a gentleman, or a man who should have been a gentleman, an eloquent popular lecturer, whose fame had gone abroad so that he was invited to lecture in distant places. On these occasions some private family always sought him as their guest. He was an inveterate smoker, and could not even rest in bed without his cigar. The bed, when he left it in the morning, was always strewed with ashes, and the chamber had the stench of a bar-room. He was never invited to a house the second time, and wherever he had made a visit he was remembered by housekeepers as a nuisance. Smoking may be regarded as more offensive to others than chewing. The latter may be concealed, the former not. Chewing contaminates the breath, soils the clothing, and defiles the floor; but smoking contaminates the atmosphere to a greater extent, saturates the clothing, and envelops the body in a perpetual cloud of fetid vapor. It is possible for abstainers to avoid in a degree the nuisance of chewing. Not so with smoking. In public assemblies, in public conveyances, in committee-rooms, and in the streets, one is compelled to respire the vitiated air. A scrupulous regard for the rights and comforts of others is an essential quality of a gentleman, and much more of a Christian. Nothing more forcibly demonstrates the demoralizing influence of tobacco than the carelessness it engenders in this respect. It is the bane of good manners. A few years of its servitude almost annihilates the gentleman. The smoker soon learns to think of himself alone, and ignores the possibility of offending others by constraining them to inhale the nauseous fumes. The smoke, when drawn into the mouth, absorbs the putrid emanations which it finds there, and diffuses them in the atmosphere. It is disgusting to reflect, as you walk the crowded thoroughfare and are compelled to take in the fumes of a thousand cigars and pipes, that you are respiring the foul effluvia from decayed teeth and filthy mouths and diseased lungs! On the assembling of certain religious bodies, it is customary to provide temporary homes for the members in private houses. Nothing is more common than for families, on these occasions, to announce their willingness to accommodate such guests as do not use tobacco. Think of it! ministers of the Gospel excluded from decent homes as nuisances!—Essay, by Dr. Gibbons of San Francisco.