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SMOKING AND DRINKING.
BY
JAMES PARTON.
BOSTON:
TICKNOR AND FIELDS.
1868.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by
TICKNOR AND FIELDS,
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the
District of Massachusetts.
UNIVERSITY PRESS: WELCH, BIGELOW, & CO.,
CAMBRIDGE.
PREFACE.
The next very important thing that man has to attend to is his health.
In some other respects, progress has been made during the last hundred
years, and several considerable obstacles to the acquisition of a
stable happiness have been removed or diminished.
In the best parts of the best countries, so much knowledge is now
freely offered to all the young as suffices to place within their reach
all existing knowledge. We may say with confidence that the time is not
distant when, in the United States, no child will live farther than
four miles from a school-house, kept open four months in the year, and
when there will be the beginning of a self-sustaining public library in
every town and village of a thousand inhabitants. This great business
of making knowledge universally accessible is well in hand; it has gone
so far that it must go on till the work is complete.
In this country, too, if nowhere else, there is so near an approach to
perfect freedom of thinking, that scarcely any one, whose conduct is
good, suffers inconvenience from professing any extreme or eccentricity
of mere opinion. I constantly meet, in New England villages, men who
differ as widely as possible from their neighbors on the most dividing
of all subjects; but if they are good citizens and good neighbors, I
have never observed that they were the less esteemed on that account.
Their peculiarities of opinion become as familiar as the color of their
hair, or the shape of their every-day hat, and as inoffensive. This is
a grand triumph of good sense and good nature; or, as Matthew Arnold
would say, of the metropolitan over the provincial spirit. It is also
recent. It was not the case fifty years ago. It was not the case twenty
years ago.
The steam-engine, and the wondrous machinery which the steam-engine
moves, have so cheapened manufactured articles, that a mechanic, in a
village, may have so sufficient a share of the comforts, conveniences,
and decencies of life, that it is sometimes hard to say what real
advantage his rich neighbor has over him. The rich man used to have one
truly enviable advantage over others: his family was safer, in case of
his sudden death. But a mechanic, who has his home paid for, his life
insured, and a year's subsistence accumulated, is as secure in this
respect as, perhaps, the nature of human affairs admits. Now, an
American workingman, anywhere out of a few largest cities, can easily
have all these safeguards around his family by the time he is forty;
and few persons can be rich before they are forty.
We may say, perhaps, speaking generally, that, in the United States,
there are no formidable obstacles to the attainment of substantial
welfare, except such as exist in the nature of things and in ourselves.
But in the midst of so many triumphs of man over material and
immaterial things, man himself seems to dwindle and grow pale. Not here
only, but in all the countries that have lately become rich enough to
buy great quantities of the popular means of self-destruction, and in
which women cease to labor as soon as their husbands and parents
acquire a little property, and in which children sit in school and out
of school from five to nine hours a day, and in which immense numbers
of people breathe impure air twenty-two hours out of every twenty-four.
In the regions of the United States otherwise most highly favored,
nearly every woman, under forty, is sick or sickly; and hardly any
young man has attained a proper growth, and measures the proper size
around the chest. As to the young girls and school-children, if, in a
school or party of two hundred, you can pick out thirty well-developed,
well-proportioned, robust, ruddy children, you will do better than I
have sometimes been able to do.
This begins to alarm and puzzle all but the least reflective persons.
People begin to wonder why every creature, whether of native or foreign
origin, should flourish in America, except man.
Not that there is anything mysterious with regard to the immediate
causes of this obvious decline in the health and robustness of the
race. Miss Nightingale tells us that more than half of all the sickness
in the world comes of breathing bad air. She speaks feelingly of the
time, not long passed, when the winds of heaven played freely through
every house, from Windsor Castle to the laborer's cottage, and when
every lady put forth muscular effort in the polishing of surfaces. That
was the time when bread was an article of diet, and the Devil had not
invented hot biscuit. The agreeable means of self-destruction, now so
cheap and universal, were unknown, or very costly; and the great mass
of the people subsisted, necessarily, upon the plain fare which affords
abundant nourishment, without overtasking the digestive powers.
Terrible epidemics, against which the medical science of the time
vainly contended, swept off weakly persons, shortened the average
duration of life, and raised the standard of health.
But now we can all pervert and poison ourselves if we will, and yet not
incur much danger of prompt extinction. Indeed, it is hard for the most
careful and resolute person to avoid being a party to the universal
violation of natural law. Children, of course, are quite helpless. How
could I help, at eight years of age, being confined six hours a day in
a school, where the word "ventilation" was only known as an object of
spelling? How could I help, on Sunday, being entombed in a
Sunday-school room, eight or nine feet high, crowded with children, all
breathing their utmost? I hated it. I loathed it. I protested against
it. I played truant from it. But I was thirteen years old before I
could escape that detested basement, where I was poisoned with
pernicious air, and where well-intentioned Ignorance made virtue
disgusting, contemptible, and ridiculous, by turns.
As all our virtues support one another, so all the vices of modern life
are allies. Smoking and drinking are effects, as well as causes. We
waste our vital force; we make larger demands upon ourselves than the
nature of the human constitution warrants, and then we crave the
momentary, delusive, pernicious aid which tobacco and alcohol afford. I
suppose the use of these things will increase or decrease, as man
degenerates or improves.
This subject, I repeat, is the next great matter upon which we have to
throw ourselves. The republication of these essays is only to be
justified on the ground that every little helps.
I think, too, that the next new sensation enjoyed by the
self-indulgent, self-destroying inhabitants of the wealthy nations will
be the practice of virtue. I mean, of course, the real thing, now
nearly forgotten, the beginning of which is self-control, and which
leads people to be temperate and pure, and enables them to go contrary
to custom and fashion, without being eccentric or violent about it.
That kind of virtue, I mean, which enables us to accept hard duties,
and perform them with cheerful steadfastness; which enables us to make
the most of our own lives, and to rear glorious offspring, superior to
ourselves.
It is surprising what a new interest is given to life by denying
ourselves one vicious indulgence. What luxury so luxurious as just
self-denial! Who has ever seen any happy people that were not
voluntarily carrying a heavy burden? Human nature is so formed to
endure and to deny itself, that those mistaken souls who forsake the
world, and create for themselves artificial woes, and impose upon
themselves unnecessary tasks, and deny themselves rational and
beneficial pleasures, are a thousand times happier than those
self-indulgent and aimless men, whom we see every afternoon, gazing
listlessly out of club-windows, wondering why it is so long to six
o'clock.
I heard a young man say, the other day, that smoking had been the bane
of his life, but that after abstaining for seven months, during which
he made no progress in overcoming the desire to smoke, he had come to
the conclusion that he was past cure, and must needs go on, as long as
he lived. He _was_ going on, when he made the remark, smoking a pipe
half as big and twice as yellow as himself. It was a great pity. That
daily longing to smoke, with the daily triumphant struggle against it,
was enough of itself to make his life both respectable and interesting.
During those seven months, he was a man. He could claim fellowship with
all the noble millions of our race, who have waged a secret warfare
with Desire, all the days of their lives. If he had kept on, if he had
not lapsed under the domination of his tyrant, he would probably have
ascertained what there was in his way of life which kept alive in him
the craving for stimulation. In all probability, he would have
conquered the desire at last.
And such a victory is usually followed by others similar. The cigar and
the bottle are often replaced by something not sensual. The brain,
freed from the dulling, lowering influence, regains a portion of its
natural vivacity; and that vivacity frequently finds worthy objects
upon which to expend itself.
NEW YORK, September, 1868.
SMOKING.
DOES IT PAY TO SMOKE?
BY AN OLD SMOKER.
I have sometimes thought that there are people whom it does pay to
smoke: those hod-carriers on the other side of the street, for example.
It cannot be a very pleasant thing to be a hod-carrier at this season
of the year, when a man who means to be at work at seven A.M. must wake
an hour before the first streak of dawn. There is an aged sire over
there, who lives in Vandewater Street, which is two miles and a quarter
from the building he is now assisting to erect. He must be astir by
half past five, in order to begin his breakfast at six; and at half
past six he is in the car, with his dinner-kettle in his hand, on his
way up town. About the time when the more active and industrious
readers of this magazine begin to think it is nearly time to get up,
this father of a family makes his first ascent of the ladder with a
load of mortar on his shoulder. At twelve, the first stroke of the bell
of St. George's Church (it is New York where these interesting events
occur) sets him at liberty, and he goes in quest of his kettle. On very
cold days, the dinner-kettle is wrapped in its proprietor's overcoat to
keep the cold dinner from freezing stiff. But we will imagine a milder
day, when the group of hod-carriers take their kettles to some sunny,
sheltered spot about the building, where they sit upon soft, commodious
boards, and enjoy their repast of cold meat and bread. The homely meal
being concluded, our venerable friend takes out his short black pipe
for his noontide smoke. How he enjoys it! How it seems to rest him! It
is a kind of conscious sleep, ending, perhaps, in a brief unconscious
sleep, from which he wakes refreshed for another five hours of the
heavy hod.
Who could wish to deny a poor man a luxury so cheap, and so dear? It
does not cost him more than ten cents a week; but so long as he has his
pipe, he has a sort of refuge to which he can fly from trouble.
Especially consoling to him is it in the evening, when he is in his own
crowded and most uninviting room. The smoke that is supposed to "poison
the air" of some apartments seems to correct the foulness of this; and
the smoker appears to be a benefactor to all its inmates, as well as to
those who pass its door.
Besides, this single luxury of smoke, at a cost of one cent and three
sevenths per diem, is the full equivalent of all the luxuries which
wealth can buy! None but a smoker, or one who has been a smoker, can
realize this truth; but it is a truth. That short black pipe does
actually place the hod-carrier, so far as mere luxury goes, on a par
with Commodore Vanderbilt or the Prince of Wales. Tokay, champagne,
turtle, game, and all the other luxurious commodities are not, taken
altogether, so much to those who can daily enjoy them, as poor Paddy's
pipe is to him. Indeed, the few rich people with whose habits I chance
to be acquainted seldom touch such things, and never touch them except
to please others. They all appear to go upon the system of the late
Lord Palmerston, who used to say to his new butler, "Provide for my
guests whatever the season affords; but for _me_ there must be always a
leg of mutton and an apple-pie." Let the Prince of Wales (or any other
smoker) be taken to a banqueting-hall, the tables of which should be
spread with all the dainties which persons of wealth are erroneously
supposed to be continually consuming, but over the door let there be
written the terrible words, "No smoking." Then show him an adjoining
room, with a table exhibiting Lord Palmerston's leg of mutton and
apple-pie, plus a bundle of cigars. If any one doubts which of these
two feasts the Prince of Wales would choose, we tell that doubting
individual he has never been a smoker.
Now the short pipe of the hod-carrier is just as good to him as the
regalias could be that cost two hundred dollars a thousand in Havana,
and sixty cents each in New York. If you were to give him one of those
regalias, he would prefer to cut it up and smoke it in his pipe, and
then he would not find it as good as the tobacco he usually smokes. The
poor laborer's pipe, therefore, is a potent equalizer. To the enjoyment
of pleasures purely luxurious there is a limit which is soon reached;
and I maintain that a poor man gets as much of this _kind_ of pleasure
out of his pipe as a prince or a railroad king can extract from all the
costly wines and viands of the table.
If there is a man in the world who ought to smoke, that ancient
hod-carrier is the man. A stronger case for smoking cannot be selected
from ordinary life. Does it pay him? After an attentive and sympathetic
consideration of his case, I am compelled reluctantly to conclude that
it does not.
The very fact that it tends to make him contented with his lot is a
point against his pipe. It is a shame to him to be contented. To a
young man the carrying of the hod is no dishonor, for it is fit that
young men should bear burdens and perform lowly tasks. But the hod is
not for gray hairs. Whenever, in this free and spacious America, we see
a man past fifty carrying heavy loads upon his shoulders, or performing
any hired labor that requires little skill or thought, we know that
there must have been some great defect or waste in that man's life. The
first dollar that George Law ever earned, after leaving his father's
house, was earned by carrying the hod at Albany. But with that dollar
he bought an arithmetic and spelling-book; which, when winter closed in
and put a stop to hod-carrying, he mastered, and thus began to prepare
to build the "High Bridge" over the Harlem River, where he made a
million dollars by using steam hod-carriers instead of Irish ones. The
pipe is one of the points of difference between the hod-carrier content
with his lot and the hod-carrier who means to get into bricklaying next
spring. Yonder is one of the latter class reading his "Sun" after
dinner, instead of steeping his senses in forgetfulness over a pipe.
He, perhaps, will be taking a contract to build a bridge over the East
River, about the time when his elderly comrade is buried in a
corporation coffin.
Of course, there are vigorous and triumphant men who smoke, and there
are dull, contented men who do not. It is only of the general tendency
of the poor man's pipe that I wish to speak. I mean to say that it
tends to make him satisfied with a lot which it is his chief and
immediate duty to alleviate. He ought to hate and loathe his
tenement-house home; and when he goes to that home in the evening,
instead of sitting down in stolid selfishness to smoke, he should be
active in giving his wife (who usually has the worst of it) the
assistance she needs and deserves. Better the merry song, the cheerful
talk, the pleasant stroll, than this dulling of the senses and the
brain in smoke. Nobler the conscious misery of such a home, than the
artificial lethargy of the pipe. It is an unhandsome thing in this
husband to steal out of his vile surroundings into cloudland, and leave
his wife and children alone to their noisome desolation.
If it does not pay this hod-carrier to smoke, it pays no man. If this
man cannot smoke without injustice to others, no man can.
Ladies, the natural enemies of tobacco, relented so far during the war
as to send tobacco and pipes to the soldiers, and worked with their own
fair hands many a pouch. Indeed, the pouch industry continues, though
we will do the ladies the justice to say that, as their pouches usually
have every excellent quality except fitness for the purpose intended,
few of them ever hold tobacco. Does the lady who presented General
Sheridan the other evening, in New York, with those superb and highly
decorated tobacco-pouches suppose the gallant General has had, or will
ever have, the heart to profane such beautiful objects with the noxious
weed? It is evident from these gracious concessions on the part of the
ladies, that they suppose the soldier is a man whose circumstances call
imperatively for the solace of smoke; and really, when the wearied men
after a long day's march gathered round the camp-fire for the evening
pipe, the most infuriate hater of the weed must have sometimes paused
and questioned the science which forbids the indulgence. But, reader,
did you ever travel in one of the forward cars of a train returning
from the seat of war, when the soldiers were coming home to re-enlist?
We need not attempt to describe the indescribable scene. Most readers
can imagine it. We allude to it merely as a set-off to the pleasant and
picturesque spectacle of the tired soldiers smoking round the
camp-fire.
In truth, the soldier is the last man in the world who should smoke;
for the simple reason, that while he, more than any other man, has need
of all his strength, smoking robs him of part of it. It is not science
alone which establishes this truth. The winning boat of Harvard
University, and the losing boat of Yale, were not rowed by smokers. One
of the first things demanded of a young man who is going into training
for a boat-race is, _Stop smoking!_ And he himself, long before his
body has reached its highest point of purity and development, will
become conscious of the lowering and disturbing effect of smoking one
inch of a mild cigar. No smoker who has ever trained severely for a
race, or a game, or a fight, needs to be told that smoking reduces the
tone of the system and diminishes all the forces of the body. He
_knows_ it. He has been as conscious of it as a boy is conscious of the
effects of his first cigar. Let the Harvard crew smoke during the last
two months of their training, and let the Yale men abstain, and there
is one individual prepared to risk a small sum upon Yale's winning back
her laurels.
A soldier should be in training always. Compelled to spend nine tenths
of his time in laboriously doing nothing, he is called upon
occasionally, for a few hours or days or weeks, to put forth exertions
which task human endurance to the uttermost. The soldier, too, of all
men, should have quiet nerves; for the phantoms of war scare more men
than its real dangers, and men's bodies can shake when their souls are
firm. That two and two make four is not a truth more unquestionably
certain than that smoking does diminish a soldier's power of endurance,
and does make him more susceptible to imaginary dangers. If a regiment
were to be raised for the hardest service of which men can ever be
capable, and that service were to be performed for a series of
campaigns, it would be necessary to exclude from the commissariat, not
tobacco only, but coffee and tea. Each man, in short, would have to be
kept in what prize-fighters call "condition"; by which term they simply
mean the natural state of the body, uncontaminated by poison, and
unimpaired by indolence or excess. Every man is in duty bound to be "in
condition" at all times; but the soldier,--it is part of his profession
to be "in condition." When remote posterity comes to read of the
millions and millions of dollars expended during the late war in curing
soldiers untouched by bayonet or bullet, the enthusiasm of readers will
not be excited by the generosity displayed in bestowing those millions.
People will lay down the book and exclaim: "How ignorant were our poor
ancestors of the laws of life! A soldier in hospital without a wound!
How extremely absurd!"
To this weighty and decisive objection minor ones may be added. The
bother and vexation arising from the pipe were very great during the
campaigns of the late war. Half the time the smokers, being deprived of
their accustomed stimulant, were in that state of uneasy longing which
smokers and other stimulators know. Men were shot during the war merely
because they _would_ strike a light and smoke. The desire sometimes
overcame all considerations of prudence and soldierly duty. A man out
on picket, of a chilly night, knowing perfectly well that lighting his
pipe would have the twofold effect of revealing his presence and
inviting a bullet, was often unable to resist the temptation. Many men,
too, risked capture in seeking what smokers call "a little fire." A
fine, stalwart officer of a Minnesota regiment, whose natural forces,
if he had given nature a fair chance, would have been abundantly
sufficient for him without the aid of any stimulant, has told me there
were nights when he would have gladly given a month's pay for a light.
Readers probably remember the incident related in the newspapers of one
of our smoking generals, who, after being defeated by the enemy, heard
of the arrival of gunboats which assured his safety, and promised to
restore his fortunes. The _first_ thing he did was to send an aid on
board a gunboat to ask if they had any cigars. He was right in so
doing. It was a piece of strategy necessitated by the circumstances.
Let any man who has been in the habit of smoking ten to twenty cigars a
day be suddenly deprived of them at a time when there is a great strain
upon body and mind, and he will find himself reduced to a state
bordering upon imbecility. Knowing what I know of the smoking habits of
some officers of high rank, I should tremble for the success of any
difficult operation, to be conducted by them in presence of an enemy,
if their cigars had given out the evening before; nor could a spy do
his employers a better service than to creep into the tents of some
generals the night before an engagement, and throw all their cigars and
tobacco into a pail of water.
Of all men, therefore, the soldier is the very last man who could find
his account in a practice which lowers the tone of his health, reduces
his power of endurance, litters his knapsack, pesters him with a system
of flints and tinder, and endangers his efficiency in critical moments.
If all the world smoked, still the soldier should abstain.
Sailors and other prisoners experience so many dull hours, and possess
so many unused faculties, that some cordial haters of tobacco have
thought that such persons might be justified in a habit which only
lessens what they have in superfluity. In other words, sailors, being
in a situation extremely unfavorable to spiritual life, ought not
merely to yield to the lowering influence of the forecastle, but add to
it one more benumbing circumstance. On the contrary, they ought to
strive mightily against the paralyzing effects of monotony,--not give
up to them, still less aggravate them. There is no reason, in the
nature of things, why a sailor, after a three years' voyage, should not
step on shore a man more alert in body and mind than when he sailed,
and all alive to communicate the new knowledge he has acquired and the
wonders he has seen. Why should he go round this beautiful world
drugged?
We must, therefore, add the sailor to the hod-carrier and the soldier,
and respectfully take away his pipe. I select these classes, because
they are supposed most to need artificial solace, and to be most
capable of enduring the wear and tear of a vicious habit. Each of these
classes also can smoke without much offending others, and each is
provided with an "expectoratoon" which disgusts no one. The hod-carrier
and the soldier have the earth and the sailor the ocean. But, for all
that, the pipe is an injury to them. Every man of them would be better
without it.
But if we must deny _them_ the false solace of their pipe, what can be
said of the all-but-universal smoking of persons supposed to be more
refined than they, and whose occupations furnish them no pretence of an
excuse? We now see painters in their studios smoking while they paint,
and sculptors pegging away at the marble with a pipe in their mouths.
Clergymen hurry out of church to find momentary relief for their tired
throats in an ecstatic smoke, and carry into the apartment of fair
invalids the odor of ex-cigars. How it may be in other cities I know
not, but in New York a parishioner who wishes to confer upon his
clergyman a _real_ pleasure can hardly do a safer thing than send him a
thousand cigars of a good clerical brand. It is particularly agreeable
to a clergyman to receive a present which supplies him with a luxury he
loves, but in which he knows in his inmost soul he ought not to
indulge. No matter for all his fine arguments, there is not one
clergyman in ten that succeeds in this short life in reducing his
conscience to such a degree of obtuseness that he can buy a box of
cigars (at present prices) without a qualm of self-reproach. Editors,
writers for the press, reporters, and others who haunt the places where
newspapers are made, are smokers, except a few controlling men, and a
few more who are on the way to become such. Most of the authors whose
names are familiar to the public smoke steadily; even the poets most
beloved do so. Philosophers have taken to the pipe of late years. Mr.
Dickens, they say, toys with a cigar occasionally, but can hardly be
reckoned among the smokers, and never touches a cigar when he has a
serious task on hand. Mr. Prescott smoked, and O, how he loved his
cigar! It was he who, when his physician had limited him to one cigar a
day, ran all over Paris in quest of the largest cigars that Europe
could furnish. In my smoking days I should have done the same.
Thackeray smoked; he was very particular in his smoking; the scent of a
bad cigar was an abomination to him. That Byron smoked, and loved "the
naked beauties" of tobacco, he has told us in the most alluring verses
the weed has ever inspired. Milton, Locke, Raleigh, Ben Jonson, Izaak
Walton, Addison, Steele, Bolingbroke, Burns, Campbell, Scott, Talfourd,
Christopher North, Lamb, were all smokers at some part of their lives.
Among our Presidents, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, General Jackson,
and probably many others, were smokers. Daniel Webster once smoked.
Henry Clay, down to a late period of his life, chewed, smoked, and took
snuff, but never approved of either practice, and stopped two of them.
General Grant smokes, but regrets that he does, and has reduced his
daily allowance of cigars. Edwin Booth smokes, as do most of the
gentlemen of his arduous profession. Probably a majority of the
physicians and surgeons in the United States, under forty years of age,
are smokers; and who ever knew a medical student that did not smoke
furiously? This, perhaps, is not to be wondered at, since doctors live
upon the bodily sins of mankind.
The question is, Does it pay these gentlemen to smoke? _They_ know it
does not. It would be gross arrogance in any individual to lift up his
voice in rebuke of so many illustrious persons, but for the fact that
there is scarcely one of them who does not feel that the practice is
wrong, or, at least, absurd. Almost all confirmed smokers will go so
far as to admit that they wish they had never acquired the habit. Few
of them desire their boys to acquire it. None recommend it to other
men. Almost all smokers, who are not Turks, Chinamen, or Indians,
appreciate at once the wisdom of Sir Isaac Newton's reply to one who
asked him why he never smoked a pipe. "Because," said he "I am
unwilling to make to myself any necessities." Nor can any intelligent
smoker doubt that the fumes of tobacco are hostile to the vital
principle. We smokers and ex-smokers all remember how our first cigar
sickened us; we have all experienced various ill effects from what
smokers call "smoking too much"; and very many smokers have, once or
twice in their lives, risen in revolt against their tyrant, given away
their pipes, and lived free men long enough to become conscious that
their whole being had been torpid, and was alive again. No, no! let who
will deny that smoking is unfriendly to life, and friendly to all that
wars upon life, smokers will not question it, unless they are very
ignorant indeed, or very young. It will be of no avail to talk to them
of the man who lived to be a hundred years old and had smoked to excess
for half a century. Smokers have that within which keeps them well in
mind that smoking is pernicious. If there are any smokers who doubt it,
it is the few whom smoke is rapidly killing; such, for example, as the
interesting professional men who smoke an excellent quality of cigars
and "break down" before they are thirty-five. It is not honest,
legitimate hard work that breaks so many people down in the prime of
life. It is bad habits.
Smoking is a barbarism. This is the main argument against what is
termed moderate smoking. There is something in the practice that allies
a man with barbarians, and constantly tends to make him think and talk
like a barbarian. Being at New Haven last September, a day or two
before the opening of the term at Yale College, I sat in one of the
public rooms of the hotel late one evening, hoping some students would
come in, that I might see what sort of people college students are in
these times. Yale College hath a pleasant seat. Who can stroll about
upon that beautiful College Green, under those majestic elms, without
envying the youth who are able to spend four long years of this
troublesome life in the tranquil acquisition of knowledge amid scenes
so refined and engaging? The visitor is bewitched with a wild desire to
give the college two or three million dollars immediately, to enable it
to become, in all respects, what it desires, aims, and intends to
become. Visions of the noble Athenian youth thronging about the sages
of eld, and learning wisdom from their lips, flit through his mind, as
he wanders among the buildings of the college, and dodges the colored
men who are beating carpets and carrying furniture. In this exalted
frame of mind, suppose the stranger seated in the room of the hotel
just mentioned. In the middle of the small apartment sat one fat,
good-humored, uneducated man of fifty, smoking a cigar,--about such a
man as we expect to find in the "office" of a large livery stable. At
half past ten a young man strolled in, smoking, who addressed the elder
by a military title, and began a slangy conversation with him upon the
great New Haven subject,--boat-racing. About eleven, three or four
other young men came in, to whom cigars were furnished by the military
chieftain. All together they blew a very respectable cloud, and the
conversation, being so strongly reinforced, became more animated.
Boating was still the principal theme. The singular merits of Pittsburg
oars were discussed. A warm dispute arose as to who was the builder of
a certain boat that had won a race three years ago. Much admiration was
expressed for the muscle, the nerve, and, above all, for the style and
method, of the crew of the Harvard boat, which had beaten the Yale boat
a few weeks before.
Nevertheless, it did not occur to me that these smoking and damning
gentlemen could be members of the college. I supposed they were young
loafers of the town, who took an interest in the pleasures of the
students, and were exchanging opinions thereon with their natural
chief, the lord of the stable. At length one said to another, "Will
Jones be here this week?" The reply was: "No, I wrote to the fellow;
but, damn him, he says he can't get here till next Thursday." "Why,
what's the matter with the cuss?" "O, he's had the fever and ague, and
he says there's no pull in him." This led me to suspect that these
young fellows were the envied youths of whom I had been dreaming under
the elms,--a suspicion which the subsequent conversation soon
confirmed. There was nothing wrong or harmful in the subject of their
talk. The remarkable circumstance was, that all the difference which
naturally exists, and naturally appears, between an educated and an
uneducated person was obliterated; and it seemed, too, that the smoke
was the "common element" in which the two were blended. It was the
cigar that kept the students there talking boat till midnight with an
elderly ignoramus, and it was the _cigar_ that was always drawing them
down to his level. If he had not handed round his cigar-case, they
would have exhausted all the natural interest of the subject in a few
minutes, and gone home to bed. All of them, too, as it happened,
confessed that smoking lessens the power of a man to row a boat, and
lamented that a certain student would be lost to the crack crew from
his unwillingness to give up his pipe.
Smoking lures and detains men from the society of ladies. This herding
of men into clubs, these dinners to which men only are invited, the
late sitting at the table after the ladies have withdrawn, the
gathering of male guests into some smoking-room, apart from the ladies
of the party,--is not the cigar chiefly responsible for these
atrocities? Men are not society; women are not society: society is the
mingling of the two sexes in such a way that each restrains and
inspires the other. That community is already far gone in degeneracy in
which men prefer to band together by themselves, in which men do not
crave the society of ladies, and value it as the chief charm of
existence. "What is the real attraction of these gorgeous
establishments?" I asked, the other evening, of an acquaintance who was
about to enter one of the new club-houses on Fifth Avenue. His reply
was: "No women can enter them! Once within these sacred walls, we are
safe from everything that wears a petticoat!" Are we getting to be
Turks? The Turks shut women in; we shut them out. The Turks build
harems for their women; but we find it necessary to abandon to women
our abodes, and construct harems for ourselves.
Humiliating as the truth is, it must be confessed, tobacco is woman's
rival, her successful rival. It is the cigar and the pipe (it used to
be wine and punch) that enable men to endure one another during the
whole of a long evening. Remove from every club-house all the means of
intoxication,--i.e. all the wine and tobacco,--and seven out of every
ten of them would cease to exist in one year. Men would come together
for a few evenings, as usual, talk over the evening papers, yawn and go
away, perhaps go home,--a place which our confirmed clubbists only know
as a convenience for sleeping and breakfasting. One of the worst
effects of smoking is that it deadens our susceptibility to tedium, and
enables us to keep on enduring what we ought to war against and
overcome. It is drunken people who "won't go home till morning."
Tyrants and oppressors are wrong in drawing so much revenue from
tobacco; they ought rather to give it away, for it tends to enable
people to sit down content under every kind of oppression.
Men say, in reply to those who object to their clubs, their men's
dinner-parties, and their smoking-rooms: "Women overwhelm society with
superfluous dry goods. The moment ladies are invited, the whole affair
becomes a mere question of costume. A party at which ladies assist is
little more than an exhibition of wearing apparel. They dress, too, not
for the purpose of giving pleasure to men, but for the purpose of
inflicting pain on one another. Besides, a lady who is carrying a
considerable estate upon her person must devote a great part of her
attention to the management of that estate. She may be talking to Mr.
Smith about Shakespeare and the musical-glasses, but the thing her mind
is really intent upon is crushing Mrs. Smith with her new lace. Even
dancing is nothing but an exceedingly laborious and anxious wielding of
yards of silk trailing out behind!" etc.
Smoky diners-out will recognize this line of remark. When ladies have
left the table, and are amusing themselves in the drawing-room in ways
which may sometimes be trivial, but are never sensual, men frequently
fall into discourse, over their cigars, upon the foibles of the sex,
and often succeed in delivering themselves of one or more of the
observations just quoted. As these noble critics sit boozing and
smoking, they can sometimes hear the brilliant run upon the piano, or
the notes of a finely trained voice, or the joyous laughter of a group
of girls,--all inviting them to a higher and purer enjoyment than
steeping their senses in barbarous smoke. But they stick to their
cigars, and assume a lofty moral superiority over the lovely beings,
the evidence of whose better civilization is sounding in their ears.
Now, one of the subtle, mysterious effects of tobacco upon "the male of
our species" is to disenchant him with regard to the female. It makes
us read the poem entitled Woman as though it were only a piece of
prose. It takes off the edge of virility. If it does not make a man
less masculine, it keeps his masculinity in a state of partial torpor,
which causes him to look upon women, not indeed without a certain
curiosity, but without enthusiasm, without romantic elevation of mind,
without any feeling of awe and veneration for the august Mothers of our
race. It tends to make us regard women from what we may style the Black
Crook point of view. The young man who boasted that he had seen the
Black Crook forty-seven times in three months must have been an
irreclaimable smoker. Nothing but the dulled, sensualized masculinity
caused by this peculiar poison could have blinded men to the ghastly
and haggard ugliness of that exhibition. The pinched and painted
vacancy of those poor girls' faces; the bony horrors of some of their
necks, and the flabby redundancy of others; the cheap and tawdry
splendors; the stale, rejected tricks of London pantomimes; three or
four tons of unhappy girls suspended in the air in various agonizing
attitudes,--to think that such a show could have run for seventeen
months! Even if science did not justify the conjecture, I should be
disposed, for the honor of human nature, to lay the blame of all this
upon tobacco.
To a man who is uncorrupt and properly constituted, woman remains
always something of a mystery and a romance. He never interprets her
quite literally. She, on her part, is always striving to remain a poem,
and is never weary of bringing out new editions of herself in novel
bindings. Not till she has been utterly conquered and crushed by
hopeless misery or a false religion does she give up the dream of still
being a pleasant enchantment. To this end, without precisely knowing
why, she turns the old dress, retrims it, or arrays herself in the
freshness of a new one, ever striving to present herself in recreated
loveliness. Uncontaminated man sympathizes with this intention, and
easily lends himself to the renewed charm. Have you not felt something
of this, old smokers, when, after indulging in the stock jests and
sneers at womankind, you lay aside your cigars, and "join the ladies,"
arrayed in bright colors and bewitching novelties of dress, moving
gracefully in the brilliant gas-light, or arranged in glowing groups
about the room? Has not the truth flashed upon you, at such moments,
that you had been talking prose upon a subject essentially poetical?
Have you never felt how mean and low a thing it was to linger in
sensual stupefaction, rather than take your proper place in such a
scene as this?
It is true, that a few women in commercial cities,--a few bankers' and
brokers' wives, and others,--bewildered by the possession of new
wealth, do go to ridiculous excess in dressing, and thus bring reproach
upon the art. It were well if their husbands did no worse. Now and
then, too, is presented the melancholy spectacle of an extravagant
hussy marring, perhaps spoiling, the career of her husband by tasteless
and unprincipled expenditures in the decoration of her person. But is
it wholly her fault? Is he not the purse-holder? Is it not a husband's
duty to prevent his wife from dishonoring herself in that manner? When
men are sensual, women will be frivolous. When men abandon their homes
and all the noble pleasures of society in order to herd together in
clubs and smoking-rooms, what right have they to object if the ladies
amuse themselves in the only innocent way accessible to them? The
wonder is that they confine themselves to the innocent delights of the
toilet. A husband who spends one day and seven evenings of every week
at his club ought to expect that his wife will provide herself both
with fine clothes and some one who will admire them. Besides, for one
woman who shocks us by wasting upon her person an undue part of the
family resources, there are ten who astonish us by the delightful
results which their taste and ingenuity contrive out of next to
nothing.
It would be absurd to say that smoking is the cause of evils which
originate in the weakness and imperfection of human nature. The point
is simply this: tobacco, by disturbing and impairing virility, tends to
vitiate the relations between the sexes, tends to lessen man's interest
in women and his enjoyment of their society, and enables him to endure
and be contented with, and finally even to prefer, the companionship of
men. And this is the true reason why almost every lady of spirit is the
irreconcilable foe of tobacco. It is not merely that she dislikes the
stale odor of the smoke in her curtains, nor merely that her quick eye
discerns its hostility to health and life. These things would make her
disapprove the weed. But instinct causes her dimly to perceive that
this ridiculous brown leaf is the rival of her sex. Women do not
disapprove their rivals; they hate them.
Smoking certainly does blunt a man's sense of cleanliness. It certainly
is an unclean habit. Does the reader remember the fine scene in
"Shirley," in which the lover soliloquizes in Shirley's own boudoir,
just after that "stainless virgin" has gone out? She had gone away
suddenly, it appears, and left disorder behind her; but every object
bore upon it the legible inscription, _I belong to a lady!_ "Nothing
sordid, nothing soiled," says Louis Moore. "Look at the pure kid of
this little glove, at the fresh, unsullied satin of the bag." This is
one of those happy touches of the great artist which convey more
meaning than whole paint-pots of common coloring. What a pleasing sense
it gives us of the sweet cleanness of the high-bred maiden! If smokers
were to be judged by the places they have _left_,--by the smoking-car
after a long day's use, by the dinner-table at which they have sat
late, by the bachelor's quarters when the bachelor has gone down
town,--they must be rated very low in the scale of civilization.
We must admit, too, I think, that smoking dulls a man's sense of the
rights of others. Horace Greeley is accustomed to sum up his opinion
upon this branch of the subject by saying: "When a man begins to smoke,
he immediately becomes a hog." He probably uses the word "hog" in two
senses: namely, _hog_, an unclean creature; and _hog_, a creature
devoid of a correct sense of what is due to other creatures. "Go into a
public gathering," he has written, "where a speaker of delicate lungs,
with an invincible repulsion to tobacco, is trying to discuss some
important topic so that a thousand men can hear and understand him, yet
whereinto ten or twenty smokers have introduced themselves, a long-nine
projecting horizontally from beneath the nose of each, a fire at one
end and a fool at the other, and mark how the puff, puffing gradually
transforms the atmosphere (none too pure at best) into that of some
foul and pestilential cavern, choking the utterance of the speaker, and
distracting (by annoyance) the attention of the hearers, until the
argument is arrested or its effect utterly destroyed." If these men, he
adds, are not blackguards, who are blackguards? He mitigates the
severity of this conclusion, however, by telling an anecdote:
"Brethren," said Parson Strong, of Hartford, preaching a Connecticut
election sermon, in high party times, some fifty years ago, "it has
been charged that I have said every Democrat is a horse-thief; I never
did. What I _did_ say was only that every horse-thief is a Democrat,
and _that_ I can prove." Mr. Greeley challenges the universe to produce
a genuine blackguard who is not a lover of the weed in some of its
forms, and promises to reward the finder with the gift of two white
blackbirds.
Mr. Greeley exaggerates. Some of the best gentlemen alive smoke, and
some of the dirtiest blackguards do not; but most intelligent smokers
are conscious that the practice, besides being in itself unclean, dulls
the smoker's sense of cleanliness, and, what is still worse, dulls his
sense of what is due to others, and especially of what is due to the
presence of ladies.
The cost of tobacco ought perhaps to be considered before we conclude
whether or not it pays to smoke; since every man who smokes, not only
pays his share of the whole expense of the weed to mankind, but he also
supports and justifies mankind in incurring that expense. The
statistics of tobacco are tremendous, even to the point of being
incredible. It is gravely asserted, in Messrs. Ripley and Dana's
excellent and most trustworthy Cyclopædia, that the consumption of
cigars in Cuba--the mere consumption--amounts to ten cigars per day for
every man, woman, and child on the island. Besides this, Cuba exports
two billions of cigars a year, which vary in price from twenty cents
each (in gold) to two cents. In the manufacture of Manilla cheroots,--a
small item in the trade,--the labor of seven thousand men and twelve
hundred women is absorbed. Holland, where much of the tobacco used in
smoky Germany is manufactured, employs, it is said, one million pale
people in the business. In Bremen there are four thousand pallid or
yellow cigar-makers. In the United States the weed exhausts four
hundred thousand acres of excellent land, and employs forty thousand
sickly and cadaverous cigar and tobacco makers. In England, where there
is a duty upon tobacco of seventy-five cents a pound, and upon cigars
of nearly four dollars a pound, the government derives about six
million pounds sterling every year from tobacco. The French government
gets from its monopoly of the tobacco trade nearly two hundred million
francs per annum, and Austria over eighty million francs. It is
computed that the world is now producing one thousand million pounds of
tobacco every year, at a _total_ cost of five hundred millions of
dollars. To this must be added the cost of pipes, and a long catalogue
of smoking conveniences and accessories. In the London Exhibition there
were four amber mouth-pieces, valued at two hundred and fifty guineas
each. A plain, small, serviceable meerschaum pipe now costs in New York
seven dollars, and the prices rise from that sum to a thousand dollars;
but where is the young man who does not possess one? We have in New
York two (perhaps more) extensive manufactories of these pipes; and
very interesting it is to look in at the windows and inspect the
novelties in this branch of art? In Vienna men earn their living (and
their dying too) by smoking meerschaums for the purpose of starting the
process of "coloring." Happily, the high price of labor has hitherto
prevented the introduction of this industry into America.