THE CIGARETTE
We are so accustomed to the sight and smell of tobacco that we entirely
overlook the fact that the tobacco of commerce in all its forms is the
product of a poisonous weed. It is first a narcotic and then an
irritant poison. It has its place in all toxicological classifications
together with its proper antidotes.
Tobacco has not achieved its almost universal popularity without strong
opposition. In England King James launched his famous "Counterblaste"
against its use. In Turkey, where men and women are alike slaves to
its fascination, tobacco was originally forbidden under severe
penalties; the loss of the ears, the slitting of the nostrils and even
death itself being penalties imposed for the infraction of the law
forbidding the use of tobacco in any form. Since then pipes, cigars,
snuff and chewing tobacco have become popularized and tobacco in some
form or another is used by almost every nation. The last development
in the form of tobacco using was the cigarette rolled between the
fingers, and the worst form of the cigarette is the manufactured
article sold in cheap packages and freely used by boys who in many
cases have not reached their teens.
The manufactured American cigarette seems to be especially deadly in
its effect. It is said to contain five and one-half per cent. of
nicotine, or more than twice as much as the Cuban-made cigarette
contains, and more than six times as much as is contained in the
Turkish cigarette.
I am not going to quarrel with the use of tobacco in general by mature
men. He who has come to man's estate is free to decide for himself
whether he shall force a poison on his revolting stomach; for the
nausea that follows the first use of tobacco is the stomach's attempt
to eject the poison which has been absorbed from pipe, cigar, or
cigarette. The grown man, too, is able to determine whether he wants
to pay the tax which the use of tobacco levies upon his time, his
health, his income and his prosperity. The most that can be said of
the use of tobacco is that if habitual users of the narcotic weed are
successful in life they must be successful in spite of the use of
tobacco and not because of it; for it is opposed to both reason and
common sense that the habitual use of a poison in any form should
promote the development and exercise of the faculties whose energetic
use is essential to success.
What I desire to do is to warn the boy, the growing youth, of the
baneful influence of the cigarette on minds yet unformed, on bodies yet
in process of development.
The danger of the cigarette to the growing boy lies first in the fact
that it poisons the body. That it does not kill at the outset is due
to the fact that the dose is small and so slowly increased that the
body gradually accommodates itself to this poison as it does to
strychnine, arsenic, opium, and other poisons. But all the time there
is a slow but steady process of physical degeneration. The digestion
is affected, the heart is overtaxed, liver and bowels are deranged in
their functions, and as the poison spreads throughout the system there
is a gradual physical deterioration which is marked alike in the
countenance and in the carriage of the body. Any person who cares to
do so may prove for himself the poisonous nature of nicotine which is
derived from tobacco and taken into the system by those who chew or
smoke.
Dr. J. J. Kellogg says: "A few months ago I had all the nicotine
removed from a cigarette, making a solution of it. I injected half the
quantity into a frog, with the effect that the frog died almost
instantly. The rest was administered to another frog with like effect.
Both frogs were full grown, and of average size. The conclusion is
evident that a single cigarette contains poison enough to kill two
frogs. A boy who smokes twenty cigarettes a day has inhaled enough
poison to kill forty frogs. Why does the poison not kill the boy? It
does tend to kill him. If not immediately, he is likely to die sooner
or later of weak heart, Bright's disease, or some other malady which
scientific physicians everywhere now recognize as a natural result of
chronic nicotine poisoning."
A chemist, not long since, took the tobacco used in an average
cigarette and soaked it in several teaspoonfuls of water and then
injected a portion of it under the skin of a cat. The cat almost
immediately went into convulsions, and died in fifteen minutes. Dogs
have been killed with a single drop of nicotine.
A single drop of nicotine taken from a seasoned pipe, and applied to
the tongue of a venomous snake has caused almost instant death.
A Western farmer tried to rear a brood of motherless chickens in his
greenhouse. But the chickens did not thrive. They refused to eat;
their skins became dry and harsh; their feathers were ruffled; they
were feverish and drank constantly. Soon they began to die. As the
temperature and general condition of the greenhouse seemed to be
especially favorable to the rearing of chickens, the florist was
puzzled to determine the cause of their sickness and death. After a
careful study of the symptoms he found that the source of the trouble
arose from the fumes of the tobacco stems burned in the greenhouse to
destroy green flies and destructive plant parasites. Though the
chickens had always been removed from the greenhouse during the tobacco
fumigation and were not returned while any trace of smoke was apparent
to the human senses, it was evident that the soil, air, and leaves of
the plants retained enough of the poison to keep the chickens in a
condition of semi-intoxication. The conditions were promptly changed,
and the chickens removed to other quarters recovered rapidly and in a
short time were healthy and lively though they were stunted in growth
because of this temporary exposure to the effects of nicotine. The
symptoms in the chickens were almost identical with the symptoms of
nicotine poisoning in young boys, and the effects were relatively the
same.
The most moderate use of the cigarette is injurious to the body and
mind of the youth; excessive indulgence leads inevitably to insanity
and death.
A young man died in a Minnesota state institution not long ago, who,
five years before, had been one of the most promising young physicians
of the West. "Still under thirty years at the time of his commitment
to the institution," says the newspaper account of his story, "he had
already made three discoveries in nervous diseases that had made him
looked up to in his profession. But he smoked cigarettes,--smoked
incessantly. For a long time the effects of the habit were not
apparent on him. In fact, it was not until a patient died on the
operating table under his hands, and the young doctor went to pieces,
that it became known that he was a victim of the paper pipes. But then
he had gone too far. He was a wreck in mind as well as in body, and he
ended his days in a maniac's cell."
Another unfortunate victim of the cigarette was, not long ago, taken to
the Brooklyn Hospital. He was a fireman on the railroad and was only
twenty-one years old. He said he began smoking cigarettes when a mere
boy. Before being taken to the hospital he smoked all night for weeks
without sleep. When in the hospital he recognized none, but called
loudly to everyone he saw to kill him. He would batter his head
against the wall in the attempt to commit suicide. At length he was
taken to the King's County Hospital in a strait jacket, where death
soon relieved him of his sufferings.
Similar results are following the excessive use of cigarettes, every
day and in all sections of the country.
"Died of heart failure" is the daily verdict on scores of those who
drop down at the desk or in the street. Can not this sudden taking
off, of apparently hale and sturdy men be related, oftentimes to the
heart weakness caused by the excessive use of tobacco and particularly
of cigarettes?
Excessive cigarette smoking increases the heart's action very
materially, in some instances twenty-five or thirty beats a minute.
Think of the enormous amount of extra work forced upon this delicate
organ every twenty-four hours! The pulsations are not only greatly
increased but also very materially weakened, so that the blood is not
forced to every part of the system, and hence the tissues are not
nourished as they would be by means of fewer but stronger, more
vigorous pulsations.
The indulgence in cigarettes stunts the growth and retards physical
development. An investigation of all the students who entered Yale
University during nine years shows that the cigarette smokers were the
inferiors, both in weight and lung capacity, of the non-smokers,
although they averaged fifteen months older.
It has been said that the universal habit of smoking has made Germany
"a spectacled nation." Tobacco greatly irritates the eyes, and
injuriously affects the optic nerves. The eyes of boys who use
cigarettes to excess grow dull and weak, and every feature shows the
mark of the insidious poison. The face is pallid and haggard, the
cheeks hollow, the skin drawn, there is a loss of frankness of
expression, the eyes are shifty, the movements nervous and uncertain,
and all this is but preliminary to the ultimate degradation and loss of
self-respect which follow the victim of the cigarette habit, through
years of misery and failure.
Side by side with physical deterioration there goes on a process of
moral degeneration which robs the cigarette smoking boy of refinement,
of manners. The moral depravity which follows cigarette habit is
appalling. Lying, cheating, swearing, impurity, loss of courage and
manhood, a complete dropping of life's standards, result from such
indulgence.
Magistrate Crane, of New York City, says: "Ninety-nine out of a hundred
boys between the ages of ten and seventeen years who come before me
charged with crime have their fingers disfigured by yellow cigarette
stains--I am not a crank on this subject, I do not care to pose as a
reformer, but it is my opinion that cigarettes will do more than liquor
to ruin boys. When you have arraigned before you boys hopelessly deaf
through the excessive use of cigarettes, boys who have stolen their
sisters' earnings, boys who absolutely refuse to work, who do nothing
but gamble and steal, you can not help seeing that there is some direct
cause, and a great deal of this boyhood crime, is, in my mind, easy to
trace to the deadly cigarette. There is something in the poison of the
cigarette that seems to get into the system of the boy and to destroy
all moral fiber."
He gives the following probable course of a boy who begins to smoke
cigarettes: "First, cigarettes. Second, beer and liquors. Third,
craps--petty gambling. Fourth, horse-racing--gambling on a bigger
scale. Fifth, larceny. Sixth, state prison."
Another New York City magistrate says: "Yesterday I had before me
thirty-five boy prisoners. Thirty-three of them were confirmed
cigarette smokers. To-day, from a reliable source, I have made the
grewsome discovery that two of the largest cigarette manufacturers soak
their product in a weak solution of opium. The fact that out of
thirty-five prisoners thirty-three smoked cigarettes might seem to
indicate some direct connection between cigarettes and crime. And when
it is announced on authority that most cigarettes are doped with opium,
this connection is not hard to understand. Opium is like whisky,--it
creates an increasing appetite that grows with what it feeds upon. A
growing boy who lets tobacco and opium get a hold upon his senses is
never long in coming under the domination of whisky, too. Tobacco is
the boy's easiest and most direct road to whisky. When opium is added,
the young man's chance of resisting the combined forces and escaping
physical, mental, and moral harm is slim, indeed."
I think the above statement regarding the use of opium by manufacturers
is exaggerated. Yet we know that young men of great natural ability,
everywhere, some of them in high positions, are constantly losing their
grip, deteriorating, dropping back, losing their ambition, their push,
their stamina, and their energy, because of the cigarette's deadly hold
upon them.
Did you ever watch the gradual deterioration of the cigarette smoker,
the gradual withdrawal of manliness and character, the fading out of
purpose, the decline of ambition; the substitution of the beastly for
the manly, the decline of the divine and the ascendency of the brute?
A very interesting study this, to watch the gradual withdrawal from the
face of all that was manly and clean, and all that makes for success.
We can see where purity left him and was gradually replaced by
vulgarity, and where he began to be cursed by commonness.
We can see the point at which he could begin to do a bad job or a poor
day's work without feeling troubled about it.
We can tell when he began to lose his great pride in his personal
appearance, when he began to leave his room in the morning and to go to
his work without being perfectly groomed. Only a little while before
he would have been greatly mortified to have been seen by his employers
and associates with slovenly dress; but now baggy trousers, unblackened
shoes, soiled linen, frayed neck-tie do not trouble him.
He is not quite as conscientious about his work as he used to be. He
can leave a half-finished job, and cut his hours and rob his employer a
little here and there without being troubled seriously. He can write a
slipshod letter. He isn't particular about his spelling, punctuation,
or handwriting, as formerly. He doesn't mind a little deceit.
Vulgarity no longer shocks him. He does not blush at the unclean test.
Womanhood is not as sacred to him as in his innocent days. He does not
reverence women as formerly; and he finds himself laughing at the
coarse jest and the common remarks about them among his associates,
when once he would have resented and turned away in disgust.
Dr. Lewis Bremer, late physician at St. Vincent's Institute for the
Insane says, "Basing my opinion upon my experience gained in private
sanitariums and hospitals, I will broadly state that the boy who smokes
cigarettes at seven will drink whisky at fourteen, take morphine at
twenty-five, and wind up at thirty with cocaine and the rest of the
narcotics."
The saddest effects of cigarette smoking are mental. The physical
signs of deterioration have their mental correspondencies. Sir William
Hamilton said: "There is nothing great in matter but man; there is
nothing great in man but mind." The cigarette smoker takes man's
distinguishing faculty and uncrowns it. He "puts an enemy in his mouth
to steal away his brains."
Anything which impairs one's success capital, which cuts down his
achievement and makes him a possible failure when he might have been a
grand success, is a crime against him. Anything which benumbs the
senses, deadens the sensibilities, dulls the mental faculties, and
takes the edge off one's ability, is a deadly enemy, and there is
nothing else which effects all this so quickly as the cigarette. It is
said that within the past fifty years not a student at Harvard
University who used tobacco has been graduated at the head of his
class, although, on the average, five out of six use tobacco.
The symptoms of a cigarette victim resembles those of an opium eater.
A gradual deadening, benumbing influence creeps all through the mental
and moral faculties; the standards all drop to a lower level; the whole
average of life is cut down, the victim loses that power of mental
grasp, the grip of mind which he once had. In place of his former
energy and vim and push, he is more and more inclined to take things
easy and to slide along the line of the least resistance. He becomes
less and less progressive. He dreams more and acts less. Hard work
becomes more and more irksome and repulsive, until work seems drudgery
to him.
Professor William McKeever, of the Kansas Agricultural College, in the
course of his findings after an exhaustive study of "The Cigarette
Smoking Boy" presents facts which are as appalling as they are
undeniable:
"For the past eight years I have been tracing out the cigarette boy's
biography and I have found that in practically all cases the lad began
his smoking habit clandestinely and with little thought of its
seriousness while the fond parents perhaps believed that their boy was
too good to engage in such practise.
"I have tabulated reports of the condition of nearly 2,500
cigarette-smoking schoolboys, and in describing them physically my
informants have repeatedly resorted to the use of such epithets as
'sallow,' 'sore-eyed,' 'puny,' 'squeaky-voiced,' 'sickly,'
'short-winded,' and 'extremely nervous.' In my tabulated reports it is
shown that, out of a group of twenty-five cases of young college
students, smokers, whose average age of beginning was 13, according to
their own admissions they had suffered as follows: Sore throat, four;
weak eyes, ten; pain in chest, eight; 'short wind,' twenty-one; stomach
trouble, ten; pain in heart, nine. Ten of them appeared to be very
sickly. The younger the boy, the worse the smoking hurts him in every
way, for these lads almost invariably inhale the fumes; and that is the
most injurious part of the practise."
Professor McKeever made hundreds of sphygmograph records of boys
addicted to the smoking habit. Discussing what the records showed, he
says:
"The injurious effects of smoking upon the boy's mental activities are
very marked. Of the many hundreds of tabulated cases in my possession,
several of the very youthful ones have been reduced almost to the
condition of imbeciles. Out of 2,336 who were attending public school,
only six were reported 'bright students.' A very few, perhaps ten,
were 'average,' and all the remainder were 'poor' or 'worthless' as
students. The average grades of fifty smokers and fifty non-smokers
were computed from the records of one term's work done in the Kansas
Agricultural college and the results favored the latter group with a
difference of 17.5 per cent. The two groups represented the same class
rank; that is, the same number of seniors, juniors, sophomores, and
freshmen."
A thorough investigation of the effects of cigarette smoking on boys
has been carried on in one of the San Francisco schools for many
months. This investigation was ordered because a great many of the
boys were inferior to the girls, both mentally and morally.
It was found that nearly three-fourths of the boys who smoked
cigarettes had nervous disorders, while only one of those who did not
smoke had any nervous symptoms. A great many of the cigarette smokers
had defective hearing, while only one of those who did not smoke was so
afflicted. A large percentage of the boys who smoked were defective in
memory, while only one boy who did not smoke was so affected. A large
portion of the boys who smoked were reported as low in deportment and
morals, while only a very small percentage of those who did not smoke
were similarly affected. It was found that the minds of many of the
cigarette smokers could not comprehend or grasp ideas as quickly or
firmly as those who did not smoke. Nearly all of the cigarette smokers
were found to be untidy and unclean in their personal appearance, and a
great many of them were truants; but among those who did not smoke not
a single boy had been corrected for truancy. Most of the smokers
ranked very low in their studies as compared with those who did not
smoke. Seventy-nine per cent. of them failed of promotion, while the
percentage of failure among those who did not smoke was exceedingly
small.
Of twenty boy smokers who were under careful observation for several
months, nineteen stood below the average of the class, while only two
of those who did not smoke stood below. Seventeen out of the twenty
were very poor workers and seemed absolutely incapable of close or
continuous application to any of their studies.
Professor Wilkinson, principal of a leading high school, says, "I will
not try to educate a boy with the cigarette habit. It is wasted time.
The mental faculties of the boy who smokes cigarettes are blunted."
Another high school principal says, "Boys who smoke cigarettes are
always backward in their studies; they are filthy in their personal
habits, and coarse in their manners, they are hard to manage and dull
in appearance."
It is apparent therefore that the cigarette habit disqualifies the
student mentally, that it retards him in his studies, dwarfs his
intellect, and leaves him far behind those of inferior mental equipment
who do not indulge in the injurious use of tobacco in any form.
The mental, moral, and physical deterioration from the use of
cigarettes, has been noted by corporations and employers of labor
generally, until to-day the cigarette devotee finds himself barred from
many positions that are open to those of inferior capabilities, who are
not enslaved by the deadly habit.
Cigarette smoking is no longer simply a moral question. The great
business world has taken it up as a deadly enemy of advancement, of
achievement. Leading business firms all over the country have put the
cigarette on the prohibited list. In Detroit alone, sixty-nine
merchants have agreed not to employ the cigarette user. In Chicago,
Montgomery Ward and Company, Hibbard, Spencer and Bartlett, and some of
the other large concerns have prohibited cigarette smoking among all
employees under eighteen years of age. Marshall Field and Company, and
the Morgan and Wright Tire Company have this rule: "No cigarettes can
be smoked by our employees." One of the questions on the application
blanks at Wanamaker's reads: "Do you use tobacco or cigarettes?"
The superintendent of the Linden Street Railway, of St. Louis, says:
"Under no circumstances will I hire a man who smokes cigarettes. He is
as dangerous on the front of a motor as a man who drinks. In fact, he
is more dangerous; his nerves are apt to give way at any moment. If I
find a car running badly, I immediately begin to investigate to find if
the man smokes cigarettes. Nine times out of ten he does, and then he
goes, for good."
The late E. H. Harriman, head of the Union Pacific Railroad system,
used to say that they "might as well go to a lunatic asylum for their
employees as to hire cigarette smokers." The Union Pacific Railroad
prohibits cigarette smoking among its employees.
The New York, New Haven, and Hartford, the Chicago, Rock Island, and
Pacific, the Lehigh Valley, the Burlington, and many others of the
leading railroad companies of this country have issued orders
positively forbidding the use of cigarettes by employees while on duty.
Some time ago, twenty-five laborers working on a bridge were discharged
by the roadmasters of the West Superior, Wisconsin Railroad because of
cigarette smoking. The Pittsburg and Western Railroad which is part of
the Baltimore and Ohio system, gave orders forbidding the use of
cigarettes by its employees on passenger trains and also notified
passengers that they must not smoke cigarettes in their coaches.
In the call issued for the competitive examination for messenger
service in the Chicago Post-office, sometime since, seven hundred
applicants were informed that only the best equipped boys were wanted
for this service, and that under no circumstances would boys who smoked
cigarettes be employed. Other post-offices have taken a similar stand.
If some one should present you with a most delicately adjusted
chronometer,--one which would not vary a second in a year--do you think
it would pay you to trifle with it, to open the case in the dust, to
leave it out in the rain overnight, or to put in a drop of glue or a
chemical which would ruin the delicacy of its adjustment so that it
would no longer keep good time? Would you think it wise to take such
chances?
But the Creator has given you a matchless machine, so delicately and
wondrously made that it takes a quarter of a century to bring it to
perfection, to complete growth, and yet you presume to trifle with it,
to do all sorts of things which are infinitely worse than leaving your
watch open out of doors overnight, or even in water.
The great object of the watch is to keep time. The supreme purpose of
this marvelous piece of human machinery is power. The watch means
nothing except time. If the human machinery does not produce power, it
is of no use.
The merest trifle will prevent the watch from keeping time; but you
think that you can put anything into your human machinery, that you can
do all sorts of irrational things with it, and yet you expect it to
produce power--to keep perfect time. It is important that the human
machine shall be kept as responsive to the slightest impression or
influence as possible, and the brain should be kept clear so that the
thought may be sharp, biting, gripping, so that the whole mentality
will act with efficiency. And yet you do not hesitate to saturate the
delicate brain-cells with vile drinks, to poison them with nicotine, to
harden them with smoke from the vilest of weeds. You expect the man to
turn out as exquisite work, to do the most delicate things to retain
his exquisite sense of ability notwithstanding the hardening, the
benumbing influence of cigarette poisoning.
Let the boy or youth who is tempted to indulge in the first cigarette
ask himself--Can I afford to take this enormous risk? Can I jeopardize
my health, my strength, my future, my all, by indulging in a practise
which has ruined tens of thousands of promising lives?
Let the youth who is tempted say, "No! I will wait until mind and body
are developed, until I have reached man's estate before I will begin to
use tobacco." Experience proves that those who reach a robust manhood
are rarely willing to sacrifice health and happiness to the cigarette
habit.
Many years ago an eminent physician and specialist in nervous diseases
put himself on record as holding the firm belief that the evil effects
of the use of tobacco were more lasting and far reaching than the
injurious consequences that follow the excessive use of alcohol. Apart
from affections of the throat and cancerous diseases of lips and tongue
which frequently affect smokers there is a physical taint which is
transmitted to offspring which handicaps the unfortunate infant "from
its earliest breath."
The only salvation of the race, said this physician, lay in the fact
that women did not smoke. If they too acquired the tobacco habit
future generations would be stamped by the degeneracy and depravity
which follow the use of tobacco as surely as they follow the use of
alcohol.
In view of these facts the increase of cigarette smoking among women
may well alarm those who have at heart the wellbeing of the rising
generation. So rapidly has this habit spread that fashionable hotels
and cafes are providing rooms for the especial use of those women who
like to indulge in an after-dinner cigarette. A noted restaurant in
New York recently added an annex to which ladies with their escorts
might retire and smoke. We often see women smoking in New York hotels
and restaurants.
Not long ago the writer was a guest at a dinner and to his surprise
several ladies at the table lighted their cigarettes with as much
composure as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
At a reception recently, I saw the granddaughter of one of America's
greatest authors smoking cigarettes.
What a spectacle, to see a descendant so nearly removed from one of
Nature's grandest noblemen, a princely gentleman, smoking! And I said
to myself, "What would her grandfather think if he could see this?"
On a train running between London and Liverpool, a compartment
especially reserved for women smokers has been provided. It is said
that three American women were the cause of this innovation. The
superintendent of one of our largest American railways says that he
would not be surprised if the American roads were compelled to follow
the lead of their English brethren.
It is not unreasonable to suppose that this addiction to the use of
tobacco is in many cases inherited. A friend told me of a very
charming young woman who was passionately devoted to tobacco. At a
time when it was not usual for women to smoke in public her craving for
a cigarette was so strong that she could not deny herself the
indulgence. She said her father, a deacon in the church, had been an
inveterate smoker, and her love of tobacco dated back to her earliest
remembrance. Every woman should use the uttermost of her influence to
discourage the use of the cigarette and enlist the girls as well as
boys in her fight against the evil and injurious practise of cigarette
smoking.