Boyville has made itself known to all classes of citizens, and has
attracted intelligent attention throughout the country. The newsboys
have learned to work together harmoniously, and this is one of the
valuable secrets of human society that all must learn in order to be
successful and happy. In the auxiliary monthly meetings the newsboys
conduct the business with more decorum and intelligence than the
average political conventions. So much for the self-governing plan.
The following interesting talk on “The Evils of Cigarette Smoking” was
part of an address delivered at one of the Sunday afternoon meetings,
and is well worth the time spent in reading:
“Smoking cigarettes causes both insanity and the degeneracy that
ends in crime. The cigarette slave is always enfeebled in body, in
mind, or in moral sense, and generally in all three. Whatever be the
cause—whether it is opium and other drugs mixed with tobacco, or oil
created in the paper by burning, or the immediate absorption of the
nicotine from the lungs by the blood, to be lodged in every nerve and
brain-cell in the system—the fact remains beyond dispute that the
cigarette is a deadly poison.
[Illustration: PASTIME—THE BEGINNING.]
“It not only deprives the blood of the proper quantity of oxygen and
thus prevents its purification, but it also loads it with filth, so
that the heart becomes clogged and the delicate convolutions of the
brain, upon which the mind’s attitude toward intellectual concepts
and moral principles depends, are paralyzed. Cigarette smoking also
creates a perpetual irritation, like unquenchable thirst, in the
nervous system. It sets up a continual discomfort, a kind of a gnawing
in the nerves, which makes the victim eternally uneasy except while
he is inhaling the poison into his lungs. The result of all this
is, that he lives in a constant state of nervous excitement, which
reacts upon his poisoned brain and makes him incapable of serious and
consecutive thought. His body is weary all the time, except when it
is being stimulated by the alcohol which cigarette slaves inevitably
seek and find, and at last cannot do without. It is a fact that crime
and cigarettes nearly always go together. Prison records show that
criminals, almost without exception, are cigarette slaves. Such is the
history of the cigarette slave, and while, if he is a natural man of
good family history, education, intelligence and ample means, he may
avoid crime, yet he is in eternal danger. Boys, newsboys, for your own
interest and welfare, for the love you have for your parents, if you
are cigarette smokers, stop it at once. If not—do not begin.”