_From a Victim of the Comparative-Statistics Habit_
_My dear Harold_:
Can a man go in for tobacco and do his duty by the United States Navy?
Life seems to be getting more difficult every day. I can no longer
enjoy my after-dinner cigar as I used to. The trouble is not physical.
My nerves are in good condition. My heart behaves quite as it should,
occasionally rising into my mouth with fear, sometimes sinking toward
my diaphragm with anticipation, but for the most part going about
its work without attracting notice. I sleep as soundly as I ever
did. The quality of the tobacco they put into cigars nowadays may be
deteriorating, but I am easy to please. No; the trouble is with my
conscience. I simply find it impossible to smoke without feeling that I
am recreant to my social obligations.
[Illustration]
Don’t imagine I am referring to my family. It is old-fashioned
practice to show how the money disbursed upon tobacco by the head of a
household might buy a home in the suburbs and endowment insurance for
the children. To-day the sociological implications of a box of cigars
are much more serious. To-day no man of conscience can light his pipe
without inflicting injury on the United States Navy. All the comfort
goes out of a cigar when one reflects upon what one might be doing for
the encouragement of education among the Southern mountaineers. Now and
then I like the feel of a cigarette between my lips; but can a man go
in for cigarettes as long as the country stands in such bitter need of
a comprehensive system of internal waterways?
I imagine I am not making myself quite clear. What I mean is that there
are so many good causes abroad nowadays, and the advocates of each and
every cause have no trouble in showing how easily they might manage
to attain the specific thing they are after if only you would consent
to sacrifice something that your own heart is rather set upon. Just
imagine if all the money that is burned up in tobacco were devoted to
the expansion of the fleet! Can there be any doubt that within a year
we should take first place among the naval powers? Provided, that is,
the English and the Germans and the Japanese did not give up smoking
at the same time that we did. It may seem far-fetched to argue any
close connection between a ten-cent cigar and a ten-million-dollar
dreadnought. That is what I have been trying to say to myself. But I
cannot help feeling that if the day of Armageddon does arrive, and the
Japanese fleet comes gliding out of Magdalena Bay, and the star of
our national destiny goes down into defeat, I shall never be able to
forgive myself for the cigar I insisted on lighting every night after
the children had been put to bed. As it is, I suffer by anticipation.
The Japanese fleet keeps popping out at me from my tobacco-jar.
You will say I am oversensitive to outside suggestion. Perhaps I am.
The fact remains that the naval situation in the Pacific is what it
is. And there are so many other national obligations. We do need a
fifteen-foot channel from the lakes to the gulf. We do need free
schools for the poor whites in the Tennessee mountains. We do need
millions to rebuild our railroads. All these demands press upon me as I
sit facing my wife across the table and timidly light my cigar. Yes, I
smoke; but I look at my wife and wonder how she can live in unconscious
proximity to such startling moral degradation.
Perhaps I am oversensitive, as you say, but these suggestions from
the outside keep pouring in on one in an irresistible stream from
many different directions. You simply cannot escape the logic of the
comparative mathematicians. A naval officer of high rank shows that
because of the wanton destruction of bird-life in the United States
our farmers lose $800,000,000 a year from the ravages of insect pests;
“so that good bird laws would enable us to sustain an enormous navy.”
Not so big a navy as this distinguished officer imagines, of course,
because the internal-waterways people will want a great deal of that
bird money, and the Southern education people will ask for a handsome
share. It does not matter that personally I have never slain birds
either for their flesh or their plumage, but I share in the indirect
responsibility. Instead of idling in my chair with a cigar, I ought to
be writing to my congressman, demanding the enactment of adequate bird
laws in the name of our naval supremacy in the Pacific and the defense
of the Panama Canal.
Such is the established mode of procedure to-day. If one is planning
the expenditure of a very large amount of public money, let him point
out how easily the money may be saved or earned by somebody else. If I
have seemed to harp too much on the man with the cigar, it is because
he is the classic type of the victim in the case. Just consider what a
trifling favor one is asked for--merely to give up a nasty, unsanitary
habit, and not only be happier oneself, but bring happiness to the
big-navy man, the internal-waterways man, the Association for the
Encouragement of Grand Opera among the Masses, the Society for the
Pensioning of Decayed Journalists, the Society for Damming the Arctic
Current on the Banks of Newfoundland, the Society for the Construction
of Municipal Airships. These enthusiastic gentry find no habit too hard
for the other man to break, no economy too difficult for the other man
to adopt, and no remedy too complicated for the other man to put into
effect. Smith is amazed that any one could refuse him $200,000,000 for
the navy.
“Why, look at your birds and your insect-ridden crops!”
“You grudge me the money for a hundred-foot automobile highway from
New York to San Francisco?” says Jones. “Why, consider your wasteful
steam-engines, with their ridiculous loss of ninety-seven per cent. of
the latent coal energy!”
“Double the efficiency of your steam-engines, and you have enough for a
dozen automobile highways.”
You see, that is all that stands in the way, Harold, a mere trifle like
doubling the efficiency of the steam-engine.
“I want $5,000,000 to build a monument twelve hundred feet high to
Captain John Smith and Pocahontas,” says Robinson. “You can’t spare
the money? Sir, take the revolving storm-doors in New York City
alone, which now represent so much wasted human energy, and harness
these doors to a series of storage batteries, and you will have your
$5,000,000 back in the course of a year.”
Will some one kindly run out and electrify all the revolving doors in
New York City?
I have a confession to make. My heart goes out to the shiftless
American farmer. He is responsible for almost as many good causes dying
of lack of nutrition as is the habitual smoker.
If the American farmer would plow deep instead of merely scratching
the soil, we could blow Japan out of the water. If he would study the
chemistry of soils, we could give free railroad rides to every man and
woman in the United States between the ages of thirty and forty-five.
If we would build decent roads, we could pay off the national debt.
In other words, if the American farmer could be persuaded to make his
land produce, say, only ten times its present yield, the millennium
would be here in a jump.
I sometimes think that to the truly social-minded person the most
immoral spectacle in life is an unscientific American farmer smoking a
five-cent cigar in a buggy mired up to the axle on a country road.
Yours,
_Simeon Strunsky_.
[Illustration: IN LIGHTER VEIN]