tobacco in that pipe, can now get his smoking for twenty-five dollars a
year. One who smokes good cigars freely (say ten a day at twenty cents
each) must expend between seven and eight hundred dollars a year.
Almost every one whose eye may chance to fall upon these lines will be
able to mention at least one man whose smoking costs him several
hundred dollars per annum,--from three hundred to twelve hundred. On
the other hand, our friend the hod-carrier can smoke a whole week upon
ten cents' worth of tobacco, and buy a pipe for two cents which he can
smoke till it is black with years.
All this inconceivable expenditure--this five hundred millions per
annum--comes out of the world's surplus, that precious fund which must
pay all the cost, both of improving and extending civilization.
Knowledge, art, literature, have to be supported out of what is left
after food, clothes, fire, shelter, and defence have all been paid for.
If the surest test of civilization, whether of an individual or of a
community, is the use made of surplus revenue, what can we say of the
civilization of a race that expends five hundred millions of dollars
every year for an indulgence which is nearly an unmitigated injury? The
surplus revenue, too, of every community is very small; for nearly the
whole force of human nature is expended necessarily in the unending
struggle for life. The most prosperous, industrious, economical, and
civilized community that now exists in the world, or that ever existed,
is, perhaps, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Yes, take it for all in
all, Massachusetts, imperfect as it is, is about the best thing man has
yet done in the way of a commonwealth. And yet the surplus revenue of
Massachusetts is set down at only three cents a day for each
inhabitant; and out of this the community has to pay for its knowledge,
decoration, and luxury. Man, it must be confessed, after having been in
business for so many thousands of years, is still in very narrow
circumstances, and most assuredly cannot afford to spend five hundred
millions a year in an injurious physical indulgence.
It is melancholy to observe what a small, mean, precarious, grudging
support we give to the best things, if they are of the kind which must
be sustained out of our surplus. At Cambridge the other day, while
looking about among the ancient barracks in which the students live, I
had the curiosity to ask concerning the salaries of the professors in
Harvard College,--supposing, of course, that such learned and eminent
persons received a compensation proportioned to the dignity of their
offices, the importance of their labors, and the celebrity of their
names. Alas! it is not so. A good reporter on the New York press gets
just about as much money as the President of the College, and the
professors receive such salaries as fifteen and eighteen hundred
dollars a year. The very gifts of inconsiderate benefactors have
impoverished the college, few of whom, it seems, have been able to give
money to the institution; most of them have merely bought distinction
from it. Thus professorships in plenty have been endowed and named; but
the college is hampered, and its resources have become insufficient, by
being divided among a multitude of objects. I beg the reader, the next
time he gives Harvard University a hundred thousand dollars, or leaves
it a million in his will, to make the sum a gift,--a gift to the
trustees,--to be expended as they deem best for the general and
permanent good of the institution, and not to neutralize the benefit of
the donation by conditions dictated by vanity. Yale, I have since
learned, is no better off. At all our colleges, it seems, the
professors either starve upon twelve or fifteen hundred dollars a year,
or eke out a subsistence by taking pupils, or by some other arduous
extra labor. But what wonder that learning pines, when we every year
waste millions upon millions of the fund out of which alone learning
can be supported!
It is so with all high and spiritual things. How the theatre
languishes! There are but four cities in the United States where a good
and complete theatre could be sustained. In the great and wealthy city
of New York there has never been more than one at a time, nor always
one. How small, too, the sale of good books, even those of a popular
cast! One of the most interesting works ever published in the United
States is the "Life of Josiah Quincy," by his son Edmund Quincy. It is
not an abstruse production. The narrative is easy and flowing,
interspersed with well-told anecdotes of celebrated men,--Washington,
Lafayette, John Adams, John Randolph, Hancock, Jefferson, and many
others. Above all, the book exhibits and interprets, in the most
agreeable manner, a triumphant human life; showing how it came to pass
that Josiah Quincy, in this perplexing and perilous world, was able to
live happily, healthily, honorably, and usefully for ninety-three
years! Splendid triumph of civilization! Ninety-three years of joyous,
dignified, and beneficial existence! One would have thought that many
thousands of people in the United States would have hurried to their
several bookstores to bear away, rejoicing, a volume recounting such a
marvel, the explanation of which so nearly concerns us all. The book
has now been published three months or more, and has not yet sold more
than three thousand copies! Young men cannot waste their hard-earned
money upon a three-dollar book. It is the price of a bundle of cigars!
Mr. Henry Ward Beecher has recently told us, in one of his "Ledger"
articles, how he earned his first ten dollars, and what he did with it.
While he was a student in Amherst he was invited to deliver a
Fourth-of-July temperance address in Brattleboro', forty miles distant.
His travelling expenses were to be paid; but the brilliant scheme
occurred to him to walk the eighty miles, and earn the stage fare by
saving it. He did so, and received by mail after his return a
ten-dollar bill,--the first ten dollars he had ever possessed, and the
first money he had ever earned. He instantly gave a proof that the test
of a person's civilization is the use he makes of his surplus money. He
spent the whole of it upon an edition of the works of Edmund Burke, and
carried the volumes to his room, a happy youth. It was not the best
choice, in literature, perhaps; but it was one that marked the
civilized being, and indicated the future instructor of his species.
Suppose he had invested the sum (and we all know students who would
make just that use of an unexpected ten-dollar bill) in a new
meerschaum and a bag of Lone-Jack tobacco! At the end of his college
course he would have had, probably, a finely colored pipe,--perhaps the
prettiest pipe of his year; but he would not have had that little
"library of fifty volumes," the solace of his coming years of poverty
and fever and ague, always doing their part toward expanding him from a
sectarian into a man of the world, and lifting him from the slavery of
a mean country parish toward the mastership of a metropolitan
congregation. His was the very nature to have been quenched by tobacco.
If he had bought a pipe that day, instead of books, he might be at this
moment a petty D.D., preaching safe inanity or silly eccentricity in
some obscure corner of the world, and going to Europe every five years
for his health.
We all perceive that smoking has made bold and rapid encroachments of
late years. It is said that the absurdly situated young man who passes
in the world by the undescriptive name of the Prince of Wales smokes in
drawing-rooms in the presence of ladies. This tale is probably false;
scandalous tales respecting conspicuous persons are so generally false,
that it is always safest and fairest to reject them as a matter of
course, unless they rest upon testimony that ought to convince a jury.
Nevertheless, it is true that smoke is creeping toward the
drawing-room, and rolls in clouds where once it would not have dared to
send a whiff. One reason of this is, that the cigar, and the pipe too,
have "got into literature," where they shed abroad a most alluring
odor. That passage, for example, in "Jane Eyre," where the timid,
anxious Jane, returning after an absence, scents Rochester's cigar
before she catches sight of his person, is enough to make any old
smoker feel for his cigar-case; and all through the book smoke plays a
dignified and attractive part. Mr. Rochester's cigars, we feel, must be
of excellent quality (thirty cents each, at least); we see how freely
they burn; we smell their delicious fragrance. Charlotte Brontë was,
perhaps, one of the few women who have a morbid love of the odor of
tobacco, who crave its stimulating aid as men do; and therefore her
Rochester has a fragrance of the weed about him at all times, with
which many readers have been captivated. "Jane Eyre" is the book of
recent years which has been most frequently imitated, and consequently
the circulating libraries are populous with smoking heroes. Byron,
Thackeray, and many other popular authors have written passages in
which the smoke of tobacco insinuates itself most agreeably into the
reader's gentle senses.
Many smokers, too, have been made such by the unexplained rigor with
which the practice is sometimes forbidden. Forbidden it must be in all
schools; but merely forbidding it and making it a dire offence will not
suffice in these times. Some of the most pitiable slaves of smoke I
have ever known were brought up in families and schools where smoking
was invested with the irresistible charm of being the worst thing a boy
could do, except running away. Deep in the heart of the woods, high up
in rocky hills, far from the haunts of men and schoolmasters (not to
speak of places less salubrious), boys assemble on holiday afternoons
to sicken themselves with furtive smoke, returning at the close of the
day to relate the dazzling exploit to their companions. In this way the
habit sometimes becomes so tyrannical, that, if the victims of it
should give a sincere definition of "vacation," it would be this, "The
time when boys can get a chance to smoke every day." I can also state,
that the only school I ever knew or heard of in which young men who had
formed the habit were induced to break themselves of it was the only
school I ever knew or heard of in which all students above the age of
sixteen were allowed to smoke. Still, it must be forbidden. Professor
Charlier, of New York, will not have in his school a boy who smokes
even at home in his father's presence, or in the street; and he is
right; but it requires all his talents as a disciplinarian and all his
influence as a member of society to enforce the rule. Nor would even
his vigilance avail if he confined himself to the cold enunciation of
the law: Thou shalt not smoke.
To forbid young men to smoke, without making an honest and earnest and
skilful attempt to convince their understandings that the practice is
pernicious, is sometimes followed by deplorable consequences. At the
Naval Academy at Annapolis, not only is smoking forbidden, but the
prohibition is effectual. There are four hundred young men confined
within walls, and subjected to such discipline that it is impossible
for a rule to be broken, the breaking of which betrays itself. The
result is, that nearly all the students chew tobacco,--many of them to
very great excess, and to their most serious and manifest injury. That
great national institution teems with abuses, but, perhaps, all the
other deleterious influences of the place united do less harm than this
one abomination.
On looking over the articles upon tobacco in the Encyclopædias, we
occasionally find writers declaring or conjecturing that, as smoking
has become a habit almost universal, there must be, in the nature of
things, a reason which accounts for and justifies it. Accounts for it,
_yes_; justifies it, _no_.
So long as man lives the life of a pure savage, he has good health
without ever bestowing a thought upon the matter. Nature, like a good
farmer, saves the best for seed. The mightiest bull becomes the father
of the herd; the great warrior, the great hunter, has the most wives
and children. The sickly children are destroyed by the hardships of
savage life, and those who survive are compelled to put forth such
exertions in procuring food and defending their wigwams that they are
always "in training." The pure savage has not the skill nor the time to
extract from the wilds in which he lives the poisons that could deprave
his taste and impair his vigor. Your Indian sleeps, with scanty
covering, in a wigwam that freely admits the air. In his own way, he is
an exquisite cook. Neither Delmonico nor Parker nor Professor Blot ever
cooked a salmon or a partridge as well as a Rocky Mountain Indian cooks
them; and when he has cooked his fish or his bird, he eats with it some
perfectly simple preparation of Indian corn. He is an absolutely
_unstimulated_ animal. The natural working of his internal machinery
generates all the vital force he wants. He is as healthy as a buffalo,
as a prize-fighter, as the stroke-oar of a university boat.
But in our civilized, sedentary life, he who would have good health
must fight for it. Many people have the insolence to become parents who
have no right to aspire to that dignity; children are born who have no
right to exist; and skill preserves many whom nature is eager to
destroy. Civilized man, too, has learned the trick of heading off some
of the diseases that used to sweep over whole regions of the earth, and
lay low the weakliest tenth of the population. Consequently, while the
average duration of human life has been increased, the average tone of
human health has been lowered. Fewer die, and fewer are quite well.
Very many of us breathe vitiated air, and keep nine tenths of the body
quiescent for twenty-two or twenty-three hours out of every
twenty-four. Immense numbers cherish gloomy, depressing opinions, and
convert the day set apart for rest and recreation into one which
aggravates some of the worst tendencies of the week, and counteracts
none of them. Half the population of the United States violate the laws
of nature every time they take sustenance; and the children go, crammed
with indigestion, to sit six hours in hot, ill-ventilated or
unventilated school-rooms. Except in a few large towns, the bread and
meat are almost universally inferior or bad; and the only viands that
are good are those which ought not to be eaten at all. At most family
tables, after a course of meat which has the curious property of being
both soft and tough, a wild profusion of ingenious puddings, pies,
cakes, and other abominable trash, beguiles the young, disgusts the
mature, and injures all. From bodies thus imperfectly nourished, we
demand excessive exertions of all kinds.
Hence, the universal craving for artificial aids to digestion. Hence,
the universal use of stimulants,--whiskey, Worcestershire sauce, beer,
wine, coffee, tea, tobacco. This is the only reason I can discover in
the nature of things here for the widespread, increasing propensity to
smoke. As all the virtues are akin, and give loyal aid to one another,
so are all the vices in alliance, and play into one another's hands.
Many a smoker will discover, when at last he breaks the bond of his
servitude, that his pipe, trifling a matter as it may seem to him now,
was really the power that kept down his whole nature, and vulgarized
his whole existence. In many instances the single act of self-control
involved in giving up the habit would necessitate and include a
complete regeneration, first physical, then moral.
Whether the Coming Man will drink wine or be a teetotaller has not yet,
perhaps, been positively ascertained; but it is certain he will not
smoke. Nothing can be surer than that. The Coming Man will be as
healthy as Tecumseh, as clean as Shirley, and as well groomed as
Dexter. He will not fly the female of his species, nor wall himself in
from her approach, nor give her cause to prefer his absence. We are not
left to infer or conjecture this; we can ascertain it from what we know
of the messengers who have announced the coming of the Coming Man. The
most distinguished of these was Goethe,--perhaps the nearest approach
to the complete human being that has yet appeared. The mere fact that
this admirable person lived always unpolluted by this seductive poison
is a fact of some significance; but the important fact is, that he
_could not_ have smoked and remained Goethe. When we get close to the
man, and live intimately with him, we perceive the impossibility of his
ever having been a smoker. We can as easily fancy Desdemona smoking a
cigarette as the highly groomed, alert, refined, imperial Goethe with a
cigar in his mouth. In America, the best gentleman and most variously
learned and accomplished man we have had--the man, too, who had in him
most of what will constitute the glory of the future--was Thomas
Jefferson, Democrat, of Virginia. He was versed in six languages; he
danced, rode, and hunted as well as General Washington; he played the
violin well, wrote admirably, farmed skilfully, and was a most
generous, affectionate, humane, and great-souled human being. It was
the destiny of this ornament and consolation of his species to raise
tobacco, and live by tobacco all his life. But he knew too much to use
it himself; or, to speak more correctly, his fine feminine senses, his
fine masculine instincts, revolted from the use of it, without any
assistance from his understanding.
There is no trace of the pipe in the writings of Washington or
Franklin; probably they never smoked; so that we may rank the three
great men of America--Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson--among the
exempts. Washington Irving, who was the first literary man of the
United States to achieve a universal reputation, and who is still
regarded as standing at the head of our literature, was no smoker. Two
noted Americans, Dr. Nott and John Quincy Adams, after having been
slaves of the weed for many years, escaped from bondage and smoked no
more. These distinguished names may serve as a set-off to the list of
illustrious smokers previously given.
Among the nations of the earth most universally addicted to smoking are
the Turks, the Persians, the Chinese, the Spanish,--all slaves of
tradition, submissive to tyrants, unenterprising, averse to
improvement, despisers of women. Next to these, perhaps, we must place
the Germans, a noble race, renowned for two thousand years for the
masculine vigor of the men and the motherly dignity of the women.
Smoking is a blight upon this valuable breed of men; it steals away
from their minds much of the alertness and decision that naturally
belong to such minds as they have, and it impairs their bodily health.
Go, on some festive day, to "Jones's Woods," where you may sometimes
see five thousand Germans--men, women, and children--amusing themselves
in their simple and rational way. Not one face in ten has the clear,
bright look of health. Nearly all the faces have a certain tallowy
aspect,--yellowish in color, with a dull shine upon them. You perceive
plainly that it is not well with these good people; they are not
conforming to nature's requirements; they are not the Germans of
Tacitus,--ruddy, tough, happy, and indomitable. To lay the whole blame
of this decline upon smoking, which is only one of many bad habits of
theirs, would be absurd. What I insist upon is this: Smoking, besides
doing its part toward lowering the tone of the bodily health, deadens
our sense of other physical evils, and makes us submit to them more
patiently. If our excellent German fellow-citizens were to throw away
their pipes, they would speedily toss their cast-iron sausages after
them, and become more fastidious in the choice of air for their own and
their children's breathing, and reduce their daily allowance of
lager-bier. Their first step toward physical regeneration will be, must
be, the suppression of the pipe.
One hopeful sign for the future is, that this great subject of the
physical aids and the physical obstacles to virtue is attracting
attention and rising into importance. Our philanthropists have stopped
giving tracts to hungry people; at least they give bread first. It is
now a recognized truth, that it takes a certain number of cubic yards
for a person to be virtuous in; and that, consequently, in that square
mile of New York in which two hundred and ninety thousand people live,
there must be--absolutely _must_ be--an immense number of unvirtuous
persons. No human virtue or civilization can long exist where four
families live in a room, some of whom take boarders. The way to
regenerate this New York mile is simply to widen Manhattan Island by
building three bridges over the East River, and to shorten the island
by making three lines of underground or overground railroad to the
upper end of it. We may say, too, there are circles--not many, it is
true, but some--in which a man's religion would not be considered a
very valuable acquisition, if, when he had "got" it, he kept on chewing
tobacco. Such a flagrant and abominable violation of the Creator's
laws, by a person distinctly professing a special veneration for them,
would be ludicrous, if it were not so pernicious.
The time is at hand when these simple and fundamental matters will have
their proper place in all our schemes for the improvement of one
another. The impulse in this direction given by the publication of the
most valuable work of this century--Buckle's "History of Civilization
in England"--will not expend itself in vain. If that author had but
lived, he would not have disdained, in recounting the obstacles to
civilization, to consider the effects upon the best modern brains of a
poison that lulls their noblest faculties to torpor, and enables them
languidly to endure what they ought constantly to fight.
It is not difficult to stop smoking, except for one class of
smokers,--those whom it has radically injured, and whose lives it is
shortening. For all such the discontinuance of the practice will be
almost as difficult as it is desirable. No rule can be given which will
apply to all or to many such cases; but each man must fight it out on
the line he finds best, and must not be surprised if it takes him a
great deal longer than "all summer." If one of this class of smokers
should gain deliverance from his bondage after a two years' struggle,
he would be doing well. A man who had been smoking twenty cigars a day
for several years, and should suddenly stop, would be almost certain
either to relapse or fall into some worse habit,--chewing, whiskey, or
opium. Perhaps his best way would be to put himself upon half allowance
for a year, and devote the second year to completing his cure,--always
taking care to live in other respects more wisely and temperately, and
thus lessen the craving for a stimulant. The more smoke is hurting a
man, the harder it is for him to stop smoking; and almost all whom the
practice is destroying rest under the delusion that they could stop
without the least effort, if they liked.
The vast majority of smokers--seven out of every ten, at least--can,
without the least danger or much inconvenience, cease smoking at once,
totally and forever.
As I have now given a trial to both sides of the question, I beg
respectfully to assure the brotherhood of smokers that it does _not_
pay to smoke. It really does not. I can work better and longer than
before. I have less headache. I have a better opinion of myself. I
enjoy exercise more, and step out much more vigorously. My room is
cleaner. The bad air of our theatres and other public places disgusts
and infuriates me more, but exhausts me less. I think I am rather
better tempered, as well as more cheerful and satisfied. I endure the
inevitable ills of life with more fortitude, and look forward more
hopefully to the coming years. It did not pay to smoke, but, most
decidedly, it pays to stop smoking.
DRINKING.
WILL THE COMING MAN DRINK WINE?