Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes | Page 5

in the lungs themselves. Excretions such
as this mean a violent wasting away of vitality and power. Taken in
large quantities into the stomach, tobacco not only causes an excretion
of mucus from the mouth, throat, and breathing organs, but it produces
an overtaxing of the liver; that is, this organ overworks in order to
counteract the presence of the poison. But one asks, If tobacco is so
injurious, why is it used with such apparent pleasure? A small quantity
of tobacco received into the system by smoking, chewing, or snuffing
is carried through the circulation to the skin, lungs, liver, kidneys, and
to all the organs of the body, by which it is moderately resisted. The
result is a gentle excitement of all these organs. They are in a state of
morbid activity. And as sensibility depends upon vital action of the
bodily organisms, there is necessarily produced a degree of sense
gratification or pleasure. The reason why these sensations are
pleasurable instead of painful is, in this state of moderate excitement
the circulation is materially increased without being materially
unbalanced. But as with every sense indulgence, when the craving for
increased doses becomes satisfied, when larger doses are taken the
circulation becomes unbalanced, vital resistance centers in one point,
congestion occurs, then the sensation becomes one of pain instead of
one of pleasure. This disturbance or excitement caused by tobacco is
nothing more nor less than disease. For it is abnormal action, and
abnormal action is fever, and fever is disease. It is state on good
authority, "that no one who smokes tobacco before the bodily powers
are developed ever makes a strong, vigorous man." Dr. H. Gibbons
says: "Tobacco impairs digestion, poisons the blood, depresses the vital
powers, causes the limbs to tremble, and weakens and otherwise
disorders the heart." It is conceded by the medical profession that
tobacco causes cancer of the tongue and lips, dimness of vision,
deafness, dyspepsia, bronchitis, consumption, heart palpitation, spinal
weakness, chronic tonsilitis, paralysis, impotency, apoplexy, and
insanity. It is held by some men that tobacco aids digestion. Dr.
McAllister, of Utica, New York, says that it "weakens the organs of

Digestion and assimilation, and at length plunges one into all the
horrors of dyspepsia."
*Tobacco dulls the mind.* It does this not only by wasting the body,
the physical basis of the mind, but it does it through habits of
intellectual idleness, which the user of tobacco naturally forms.
Whoever heard of a first-class loafer who did not e-a-t the weed or burn
it, or both? On the rail train recently we were compelled to ride for an
hour in the smoking-car, which Dr. Talmage has called "the nastiest
place in Christendom." In front of me sat a young man, drawing and
puffing away at a cigar, polluting the entire region about him. In the
short hour enough time was lost by that young man to have carefully
read ten pages of the best standard literature. All this we observed by
an occasional glance from the delightful volume in our own hands. The
ordinary user of tobacco has little taste for reading, little passion for
knowledge, and superficial habits of continued reasoning. His leisure
moments are absorbed in the sense-gratification of the weed. But if as
much attention had been given in acquiring the habit of reading as had
been given in learning the use of tobacco, the most valuable of all
habits would take the place of one of the most useless of all habits.
When we see a person trying to read with a cigar or a pipe in his mouth,
Knowing that nine-tenths of his real consciousness is given to his
smoking, and one-tenth to what he is reading, we are reminded of the
commercial traveler who "wanted to make the show of a library at
home, so he wrote to a book merchant in London, saying: "Send me six
feet of theology, and about as much metaphysics, and near a yard of
civil law in old folio." Not a sentimentalist, a reformer, nor a crank, but
Dr. James Copeland says: "Tobacco weakens the nervous powers,
favors a dreamy, imaginative, and imbecile state of mind, produces
indolence and incapacity for manly or continuous exertion, and sinks
its votary into a state of careless inactivity and selfish enjoyment of
vice." Professor L. H. Gause writes: "The intellect becomes duller and
duller, until at last it is painful to make any intellectual effort, and we
sink into a sensuous or sensual animal. Any one who would retain a
clear mind, sound lungs, undisturbed heart, or healthy stomach, must
not smoke or chew the poisonous plant." It is commonly known that in
a number of American and foreign colleges, by actual testing, the
non-user of tobacco is superior in mental vigor