Part 6 — TOBACCO AND THE CIGARETTE PART FOUR—MORAL AND MENTAL EFFECTS
Reading edition
If one sin breaks through the door, It will soon make room for more; Shut the door against the first, Then you’ll never meet the worst.
C. M. Willis, Page 96, Temperance Torchlights.
“Out of six hundred in the State prison at Auburn, N. Y., sent there for crimes committed through strong drink, five hundred testified that it was tobacco that led them to intemperance.”—Meta Lander.
“Smoking and chewing tobacco, by rendering water and other simple liquids insipid to the taste, dispose very much to the use of ardent spirits. Hence the practice of smoking cigars has been followed by the use of brandy and water as a common drink.”—Dr. Benj. Rush, Formerly Professor of Chemistry and Theory and Practice of Medicine in Philadelphia Medical College.
“The use of tobacco among the young is productive of mental and moral deterioration, while in the older persons, the use of the weed produces brain diseases and insanity. I have had a large experience in brain diseases, and am satisfied that smoking is the most noxious habit. I know of no other cause or agent that so much tends to bring on functional diseases, and through this, in the end, leads to organic diseases of the brain.”—Dr. Solly, of St. Thomas Hospital, of England.
“In all my twenty-five years’ experience as a teacher, I have never known an exception to the rule, that a boy in taking on the tobacco habit in any form, immediately begins to deteriorate mentally. If he takes Cigarettes he will degenerate morally very rapidly, and physically, too. I am firmly convinced that tobacco in any form degenerates morally as it relates to growing boys.”—H. H. Cully, Principal Glenville High School, Cleveland, Ohio.
“It is more difficult to restore an inebriate who persists in the use of tobacco. In some cases when tobacco is given up, all desire for spirits disappear.”—T. D. Crothers, M. D., Editor Journal of Inebriety.
“So inseparable are the habits of drinking and smoking, that in some places the same word expresses both. Thus, the word ‘peend,’ in the Bengalia language, signifies ‘to drink’ and ‘to smoke.’”—Clarke.
“The inebriate who uses tobacco, has always a weaker nervous system than one who does not. Tobacco undoubtedly predisposes to, and encourages the use of, alcohol. In all cases it has an appreciable injurious effect upon the nerve-centers.”—T. D. Crothers, M. D., Editor Journal of Inebriety.
A Nuisance,—The Smoker
“Signs may threaten, men may warn him, Babies cry, and women coax, But he cares not one iota; For he calmly smokes and smokes.”
