Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes | Page 5

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 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