Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes | Page 6

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, every public resort and waiting-room departments for men, every rendezvous of rogues, loafers, villains, and tramps is thoroughly saturated with the vile stench of the cuspidor and the poisonous odors of the pipe and cigar. "Rev. Dr. Cox abandoned tobacco after a drunken loafer asked him for a light." Not until then had he seen and felt the disreputable fraternity that existed between the users of tobacco.
Owen Meredith gives us a standard of strength and freedom, which is an inspiration to every lover of rounded, perfected manhood and womanhood:
"Strong is that man, he only strong, To whose well-ordered will belong, For service and delight, All powers that in the face