It is estimated that there are two hundred millions of tobacco-users in
the world. What a splendid regiment of sneezers, spewers, smokers, and
spitters they would make! They would form a phalanx of five deep, reaching
entirely around the world.
Wouldn't they look gay? Forty millions, with filthy old tobacco pipes
stuck in their mouths, "smoking away 'like devils!'" Eighty millions, with
best Havana cigars, made in Connecticut and New York, from cabbage leaf,
waste stumps of cigars, and "old soldiers," thrown away by Irish, Dutch,
Italians, French, and Chinese, out of cancerous mouths, whiskey mouths,
syphilitic and ulcerous mouths, rotten-toothed
mouths--splendid!--protruding from between their sweet lips! Forty
millions with pigtail and fine cut, sweet "honey dew," made as above,
scented, grinding away in their forty million human mills! Forty millions,
including five millions in petticoats, holding cartridge boxes (of snuff)
in their delicate hands, from which they distribute death-dealing
ammunition to--their lovely noses!
See them "marching along, marching along," to the tune that never an "old
cow died on" yet, or hogs, or any animal, except he unfortunately became
mixed up involuntarily with viler humans,--with jolly banners, blacked in
the smoke and stench of great battles, bearing the words "Death to
Purity!" "War to the Hilt with Health!" "All hail, Disease, Drunkenness,
and Death!"
Splendid picture!
Alas! true picture!
And what do they leave in their wake?
Death to all animal and vegetable life!
The vile spittle and debris dropped by the way have killed all vegetable
life. There's nothing vile and filthy that they have not cursed the ground
with.
The following are a few of the articles mixed with various brands of
tobacco, as though the original poisonous weed was not sufficiently
deleterious: Opium, copperas, iron, licorice,--blacked with
lampblack,--the dirtiest refuse molasses, the offal of urine, etc.
The effluvia and smoke arising have killed the foliage and the birds by
the wayside, and miles of beautiful forests have been burned away. Nothing
but a broad strip of blackened, cursed, and barren waste, remains. To
offset this evil there is--nothing.
Now, this army is daily on its march through our land, and I have only
_begun_ to mention its depredations. Who will stop it?