“Moral Statistician.”—I don’t want any of your statistics; I took your
whole batch and lit my pipe with it. I hate your kind of people. You are
always ciphering out how much a man’s health is injured, and how much
his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents he
wastes in the course of ninety-two years’ indulgence in the fatal
practice of smoking; and in the equally fatal practice of drinking
coffee; and in playing billiards occasionally; and in taking a glass of
wine at dinner, etc., etc., etc. And you are always figuring out how
many women have been burned to death because of the dangerous fashion of
wearing expansive hoops, etc., etc., etc. You never see more than one
side of the question. You are blind to the fact that most old men in
America smoke, and drink coffee, although, according to your theory,
they ought to have died young; and that hearty old Englishmen drink wine
and survive it, and portly old Dutchmen both drink and smoke freely, and
yet grow older and fatter all the time. And you never try to find out
how much solid comfort, relaxation, and enjoyment a man derives from
smoking in the course of a lifetime (which is worth ten times the money
he would save by letting it alone), nor the appalling aggregate of
happiness lost in a lifetime by your kind of people from _not_ smoking.
Of course you can save money by denying yourself all those little
vicious enjoyments for fifty years; but then what can you do with it?
What use can you put it to? Money can’t save your infinitesimal soul.
All the use that money can be put to is to purchase comfort and
enjoyment in this life; therefore, as you are an enemy to comfort and
enjoyment, where is the use of accumulating cash? It won’t do for you to
say that you can use it to better purpose in furnishing a good table,
and in charities, and in supporting tract societies, because you know
yourself that you people who have no petty vices are never known to give
away a cent, and that you stint yourselves so in the matter of food that
you are always feeble and hungry. And you never dare to laugh in the
daytime for fear some poor wretch, seeing you in a good humor, will try
to borrow a dollar of you; and in church you are always down on your
knees, with your eyes buried in the cushion, when the contribution box
comes around; and you never give the revenue officers a full statement
of your income. Now you know all these things yourself, don’t you? Very
well, then, what is the use of your stringing out your miserable lives
to a lean and withered old age? What is the use of your saving money
that is so utterly worthless to you? In a word, why don’t you go off
somewhere and die, and not be always trying to seduce people into
becoming as “ornery” and unloveable as you are yourselves, by your
villainous “moral statistics”? Now I don’t approve of dissipation, and I
don’t indulge in it, either; but I haven’t a particle of confidence in a
man who has no redeeming petty vices, and so I don’t want to hear from
you any more. I think you are the very same man who read me a long
lecture last week about the degrading vice of smoking cigars, and then
came back, in my absence, with your reprehensible fireproof gloves on,
and carried off my beautiful parlor stove.
“Young Author.”—Yes, Agassiz _does_ recommend authors to eat fish,
because the phosphorus in it makes brain. So far you are correct. But I
cannot help you to a decision about the amount you need to eat—at least,
not with certainty. If the specimen composition you send is about your
fair usual average, I should judge that perhaps a couple of whales would
be all you would want for the present. Not the largest kind, but simply
good, middling-sized whales.