[Illustration]
After a separation of many 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 a shaven cheek, but,--as I told him after we had
chatted awhile about each other’s ups and downs since the war,--I was
sure this was the first time I had ever seen 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 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 at any
price.
“In forty-eight hours I was more uncomfortable and unstrung than I had
ever been in 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 am ashamed to
confess that 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, 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 weakness.
“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 short-comings, 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.
[Illustration: _An Unsocial Habit_]
[Illustration: _The Smoking Doctor_]
“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 into 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 me 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 door 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 still 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 doctors 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 of Paris,
and the military schools of Germany, purely on hygienic grounds. The
governments of these smoking nations are not likely to be notional in
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 it no doubt often does, to worse vices.
I don’t know how to forgive myself for the example 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, that 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 would willingly 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 other men out of the gentlemen’s cabins on the
ferryboats, and from the gentlemen’s waiting rooms in railroad
stations, monopolizing these rooms as coolly as if they, only, had any
rights in them.
“I can’t explain such things except on the theory that tobacco beclouds
the moral sense, and makes men especially selfish.”
The Major’s train came in just then, and as he took my hand to say
“Good-by,” the smoking car of the waiting train 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 car for the
smokers, 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.”