Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes | Page 6

and scholarship to the

user of it. In view of this fact, our Government will not allow the use of
tobacco at West Point or at Annapolis. And in the examinations in the
naval academy a large percentage of those who fail to pass, fail because
of the evil effects of smoking.
Tobacco drains the pocketbook. "Will you please look through my
mouth and nose?" asked a young man once of a New York physician.
The man of medicine did so, and reported nothing there. "Strange!
Look again. Why, sir, I have blown ten thousand dollars--a great
tobacco plantation and a score of slaves--through that nose." The
Partido cigar regularly retails at from twenty-five to thirty cents each.
An ordinary smoker will smoke four cigars a day. Three hundred and
sixty-five dollars a year, besides his treating. A small fortune every ten
years! A neighbor of ours on the farm used to go to town in the spring
and buy enough chewing tobacco to last him until after harvest, and
flour to last the family for two weeks. Among all classes of people this
useless drain of the pocketbook is increasing. In our country last year
more money was spent for tobacco than was spent for foreign missions,
for the Churches, and for public education, all combined. Our tobacco
bill in one year costs our Nation more than our furniture and our boots
and shoes; more than our flour and our silk goods; one hundred and
forty-five million dollars more than all our printing and publishing; one
hundred and thirty-five million dollars more than the sawed lumber of
the Nation. Each year France buys of us twenty-nine million pounds of
tobacco, Great Britain fifty millions, and Germany sixty-nine million
pounds, to say nothing of how much these nations import from other
countries. Never before has the use of tobacco been so widespread as
to-day. "The Turks and Persians are the greatest smokers in the world.
In India all classes and both sexes smoke; in China the
practice--perhaps there more ancient--is universal, and girls from the
age of eight or nine wear as an appendage to their dress a small silken
pocket to hold tobacco and a pipe." Nor can the expense and
widespread use of tobacco be defended on the ground that it is a luxury,
for the abstainer from tobacco counts it the greater luxury not to use it.
The only explanation for its use is, that it is a habit which binds one
hand and foot, and from which no person with ordinary will power in
his own strength can free himself.
Tobacco blunts the moral nature. It is not certain how long tobacco has

been used as a narcotic. Some authorities hold that the smoking of
tobacco was an ancient custom among the Chinese. But if this is true,
we know that it did not spread among the neighboring nations. When
Columbus came to America he found the natives of the West Indies and
the American Indian smoking the weed. With the Indian its use has
always had a religious and legal significance. Early in the sixteenth
century tobacco was introduced into England, later into Spain, and still
later, in 1560, into Italy. Used for its medicinal properties at first, soon
it came to be used as a luxury. The popes of Italy saw its harm and
thundered against it. The priests and sultans of Turkey declared
smoking a crime. One sultan made it punishable with death. The pipes
of smokers were thrust through their noses in Turkey, and in Russia the
noses of smokers were cut off in the earlier part of the seventeenth
century. "King James I of England issued a counterblast to tobacco, in
which he described its use as a 'custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to
the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black,
stinking fumes thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke
of the pit that is bottomless.'" As one contrasts this sentiment with the
practice of the present sovereign of England, his breath is almost taken
away in his great fall from the sublime to the ridiculous!
While we do not believe a moderate use of tobacco for a mature person
is necessarily a sin, yet we do believe that it does blunt the moral sense,
and soon leads to spiritual weakness and indifference, which are sins.
To love God with all one's heart, mind, soul, and strength, and one's
neighbor as himself, means not only a denial of that which is
questionable in morals, but a practice of that which is positively good.
However noble or worthy in character may be some who use tobacco,
yet by common consent it is a "tool of the devil." Every den of
gamblers, every low-down grogshop, every smoking-car,