After a separation of ten years I met my old friend, Major----, at a
railway station. If he had not spoken first I should not have
recognized my Virginia comrade of '64. It was not merely the disguise
of a silken hat and shaven cheek, but--as I told him after we had
chatted a little about each other's ups and downs since the war--I
was sure this was the first time I ever saw him away from the table
without a cigar in his mouth.
"Haven't smoked for five years," was his reply. "I'm down on tobacco
as thoroughly as you ever were."
"Good! Tell me all about it."
We locked arms, and walked leisurely up and down the platform.
Dropping the dialogue, this was, in substance, his story:--
"It wasn't a sudden conversion. I never was quite so easy in my mind
over it as I pretended to be. I intended to taper off when I got home
from the army. And I did, smoked less in three weeks than I used to in
one. But one summer I went off on some business for our company, which
kept me up in the mountains, among the charcoal-burners, three days
longer than I expected. I got out of cigars, and couldn't obtain any
for love or money. In forty-eight hours I was more uncomfortable and
unstrung than I ever was before in all my life. I actually borrowed an
old Irishman's filthy clay pipe, and tried to smoke it. I thought of
that miserable summer we spent crawling about the trenches in
Virginia, and I wished I was there again, with a cigar in my mouth.
Then I began to realize what a shameful bondage I was in to a mere
self-indulgence. I, a man who secretly prided himself on his
self-control, nerve, and manliness,--who never flinched at hard fare
or rough weather,--a downright slave to a bad habit; unnerved and
actually unfit for business for lack of a cigar. It made me angry at
myself; I despised myself for my pusillanimity.
"Going into the matter a little further, I found that the money I had
spent for cigars in a dozen years would have paid for my house and
furnished it. I had smoked away more money than I had laid out for our
library, our periodicals, and our intellectual culture generally.
Cigars had cost me nearly twice as much as I had given to church work,
missions, and charity. My conscience rose up at the record. I knew I
could not plead any equivalent for the outlay; it had not fed me; it
had not strengthened me; it had simply drugged me. Every cigar had
made the next cigar a little more necessary to my comfort. To use the
mildest word, it had been a _useless_ expenditure.
"My detention in the mountains was calculated to open my eyes to my
domestic shortcomings, and I saw, as I never saw before, how selfishly
unsocial tobacco had made me at home. I smoked before I was married,
and my wife never entered any protest against my cigars afterward. But
our first baby was a nervous child, and the doctor told me it would
not do for it to breathe tobacco smoke. So I got in the way of
shutting myself up in the library of evenings, and after meals, to
enjoy my cigars. As I look at it now, nothing is more absurd than to
call smoking a social habit. It's a poor pretense of sociability,
where a man is simply intent on his own enjoyment. My wife owns now,
that my tobacco-tainted breath and tobacco-saturated clothing were
always more or less a trial to her. The satisfaction it has given her
to be rid of a tobacco atmosphere, and the thought of my contemptibly
selfish indifference to her comfort all those years, have humbled me,
I tell you. And I wouldn't exchange my own daily satisfaction
now-a-days in being a _cleaner_ man--inside and outside--for the
delight that anybody gets out of his cigars.
"I didn't need to go outside of my own doors to find reasons enough
for giving up the habit; but I think I found still stronger ones,
after all, when I went away from home. The more I thought about the
harm tobacco does in the community at large, the more sure I felt that
it was time for me to stop giving it the moral support of my example.
I know I smoked too much, and that my nervous system is the worse for
it; and I think the people who are likely to be hurt the most by it
are just the ones who are most likely to smoke excessively. And then,
I've noticed that the medical men who stand up for tobacco, are always
men who use it, and are liable to the suspicion of straining a point
in justification of their own self-indulgence.
"On one point, though, I believe the authorities agree. No one denies
that it is a damaging indulgence for boys. It means a good deal when
smoking is forbidden to the pupils in the polytechnic schools in
Paris, and the military schools in Germany, purely on hygienic
grounds. The governments of these smoking nations are not likely to be
notional on that matter. But the use of tobacco by our American boys
and men is excessive and alarming. We ought to save our rising
generation for better work than they can do if tobacco saps the
strength of their growing years, and makes the descent easier, as no
doubt it often does, to worse vices. I don't know how to forgive
myself for the temptation I set before my Sabbath-school class of
bright boys, year after year, by my smoking habits.
"It isn't in the family, either, that the selfishness of the habit is
most apparent. I don't believe, other things being equal, there is any
other class of men who show such a disregard in public for other
people's comfort as tobacco users do. A man would be considered a
rowdy or a boor who should wilfully spatter mud on the clothing of a
lady as she passed him on the sidewalk. But a lady to whom tobacco
fumes are more offensive than mud, can hardly walk the streets in
these days, but that men who call themselves gentlemen--and who _are_
gentlemen in most other respects--blow their cigar smoke into her
face at almost every step. Smokers drive non-smokers out of the
gentlemen's cabins on the ferry-boats, and the gentlemen's
waiting-rooms in railway stations, monopolizing these rooms as coolly
as if only _they_ had any rights in them. I can't explain such
phenomena except on the theory that tobacco befogs the moral sense,
and makes men specially selfish."
The Major's train came in just then, and as he took my hand to say
good-by, its smoking-car drew his parting shot: "See there! Did you
ever reflect how the tobacco habit levies its taxes on everybody? The
railway company furnishes an extra seat to every smoker, which, in the
nature of the case, must be paid for by an extra charge on the tickets
of all the passengers. What a stir it would raise, if the legislature
should attempt to furnish luxuries to any special class, at public
cost, in this way. How we'd vote them down! I vote against _this_
thing by throwing away my cigar!"