Tobacco and Alcohol. Fiske John
consequently, is incapable of seeing that one man's meat may be another man's poison, and which is unable to steer safely by Scylla without turning the helm so far as to pitch head foremost into Charybdis. Mr. Parton sees that athletic exercise is healthful, and he jumps at once to the conclusion that every man should always and in all circumstances keep himself in training. Such was not the theory of the ancient Athenians: μηδεν ἂγαν was their principle of life, – the principle by virtue of which they made themselves competent to instruct mankind.
Having thus said his say about muscular men, Mr. Parton goes on to declare that smoking is a barbarism. "There is something in the practice that allies a man with barbarians, and constantly tends to make him think and talk like a barbarian." We suppose Mr. Parton must know this; for he does not attempt to prove it, unless indeed he considers a rather stupid anecdote to be proof. He tells us how he listened for an hour or so to half a dozen Yale students in one of the public rooms of a New-Haven hotel, talking with a stable-keeper about boat-racing. They swore horribly; and of course Mr. Parton believes that if they had not been smokers they would neither have used profane language nor have condescended to talk with stable-keepers. Sancta simplicitas!
"We must admit, too, I think, that smoking dulls a man's sense of the rights of others. Horace Greeley is accustomed to sum up his opinions upon this branch of the subject by saying: 'When a man begins to smoke, he immediately becomes a hog.'" Our keen enjoyment of Mr. Greeley's lightness of touch and refined delicacy of expression should not be allowed to blind us to the possible incompleteness of his generalization. What! Milton a hog? Locke, Addison, Scott, Thackeray, Robert Hall, Christopher North – hogs?
And then smoking is an expensive habit. If a man smoke ten cigars daily, at twenty cents each, his smoking will cost him from seven to eight hundred dollars a year. This dark view of the case needs to be enlivened by a little contrast. "While at Cambridge the other day, looking about among the ancient barracks in which the students live, I had the curiosity to ask concerning the salaries of the professors in Harvard College." Probably he inquired of a Goody, or of one of the Pocos who are to be found earning bread by the sweat of their brows in the neighbourhood of these venerable shanties, for it seems they told him that the professors were paid fifteen or eighteen hundred dollars a year. Had he taken the trouble to step into the steward's office, he might have learned that they are paid three thousand dollars a year. Such is the truly artistic way in which Mr. Parton makes contrasts – $1500 per annum for a professor, $800 for cigars! Therefore, it does not pay to smoke.
Smoking, moreover, makes men slaves. The Turks and Persians are great smokers, and they live under a despotic form of government. Q.E.D. The extreme liberality of Oriental institutions before the introduction of tobacco Mr. Parton probably thinks so well known as not to require mention. But still worse, the Turks and Persians are great despisers of women; and this is evidently because they smoke. For woman and tobacco are natural enemies. The most perfect of men, the "highly-groomed" Goethe – as Mr. Parton elegantly calls him – loved women and hated tobacco. This aspect of the question is really a serious one. Tobacco, says our reformer, is woman's rival, – and her successful rival; therefore she hates it. For as Mr. Parton, with profound insight into the mysteries of the feminine character, gravely observes, "women do not disapprove their rivals; they hate them." This "ridiculous brown leaf," then, is not only in general the cause of all evil, but in particular it is the foe of woman. "It takes off the edge of virility"!!2 It makes us regard woman from the Black Crook point of view. If it had not been for tobacco, that wretched phantasmagoria would not have had a run of a dozen nights. "Science" justifies this conjecture, and even if it did not, Mr. Parton intimates that he should make it. Doubtless!
One bit of Mr. Parton's philosophy still calls for brief comment. He wishes to speak of the general tendency of the poor man's pipe; and he means to say "that it tends to make him satisfied with a lot which it is his chief and immediate duty to alleviate, – he ought to hate and loathe his tenement-house home." A fine specimen of the dyspeptic philosophy of radicalism! Despise all you have got, because you cannot have something better. We believe it is sometimes described as the philosophy of progress. There can of course be no doubt that Mr. Parton's hod-carrier will work all the better next day, if he only spends the night in fretting and getting peevish over his "tenement-house home."
Such then, in sum and substance, is our reformer's indictment against tobacco. It lowers the tone of our systems, and it makes us contented; it wastes money, it allies us with barbarians, and it transforms us —mira quadam metamorphosi– into swine. Goethe, therefore, did not smoke, the Coming Man will not smoke, and General Grant, with tardy repentance, "has reduced his daily allowance of cigars." And as for Mr. Buckle, the author of an able book which Mr. Parton rather too enthusiastically calls "the most valuable work of this century," – if Mr. Buckle had but lived, he would doubtless have inserted a chapter in his "History," in which tobacco would have been ranked with theology, as one of the obstacles to civilization.
Throughout Mr. Parton's rhapsody, the main question, the question chiefly interesting to every one who smokes or wishes to smoke, is uniformly slurred over. Upon the question whether it is unhealthy to smoke, the Encyclopædias which Mr. Parton has consulted do not appear to have helped him to an answer. Yet this is a point which, in making up our minds about the profitableness of smoking, must not be taken for granted, but scientifically tested.
What, then, does physiology say about this notion – rather widespread in countries over which Puritanism has passed – that the use of tobacco is necessarily or usually injurious to health? Simply that it is a popular delusion – a delusion which even a moderate acquaintance with the first principles of modern physiology cannot fail to dissipate. Nay, more; if our interpretation shall prove to be correct, it goes still further. It says that smoking, so far from being detrimental to health, is, in the great majority of cases, where excess is avoided, beneficial to health; in short, that the careful and temperate smoker is, other things equal, likely to be more vigorous, more cheerful, and more capable of prolonged effort than the man who never smokes.
We do not pretend to know all this, nor are we "as certain of it as that two and two make four." Such certainty, though desirable, is not to be had in complex physiological questions. But we set down these propositions as being, so far as we can make out, in the present state of science, the verdict of physiology in the matter. Future inquiry may reverse that verdict; but as the physiologic evidence now stands, there is a quite appreciable preponderance in favor of the practice of smoking. Such was our own conclusion long before we had ever known, or cared to know, the taste of a cigar or pipe; and such it remains after eight years' experience in smoking. We shall endeavor concisely to present the rationale of the matter, dealing with some general doctrines likely to assist us both now and later, when we come to speak of alcohol.
We do not suppose it necessary to overhaul and quote all that the illustrious Pereira, in his "Materia Medica,"3 and Messrs. Johnston and Lewes, in their deservedly popular books, have said about the physiologic action of tobacco. Their works may easily be consulted by any one who is interested in the subject; and their verdict is in the main confined to the general proposition that, from the temperate use of tobacco in smoking, no deleterious results have ever been proved to follow. More modern and far more elaborate data for forming an opinion are to be found in the great treatise of Dr. Anstie, on "Stimulants and Narcotics," which we shall make the basis of the following argument.4
In the first place, we want some precise definition of the quite vaguely understood word, "narcotic." What is a narcotic? A narcotic is any poison which, when taken in sufficient quantities into the system, produces death by paralysis. The tyro in physiology knows that death must start either from the lungs, the heart, or the nervous system. Now a narcotic is anything which, in due quantity, kills by killing the nervous system. When death is caused by too great a proportion of carbonic acid in the air, it begins at the lungs; but when it is caused by a dose of prussic acid, it begins at the medulla oblongata, the death of which causes the heart and lungs to stop acting. Prussic acid is, therefore, a narcotic; and so are strychnine, belladonna, aconite, nicotine, sulphuric ether, chloroform, alcohol, opium, thorn-apple, betel, hop, lettuce, tea, coffee, coca, hemp,
When we first read this remark, we took it for a mere burst of impassioned rhetoric; but on second thoughts, it appears to have a meaning. Another knight-errant in physiology charges tobacco with producing "giddiness, sickness, vomiting, vitiated taste of the mouth, loose bowels, diseased liver, congestion of the brain, apoplexy, palsy, mania, loss of memory, amaurosis, deafness, nervousness,
"I am not acquainted with any well-ascertained ill effects resulting from the habitual practice of smoking." – Pereira,
Only a basis, however. The argument as applied to tobacco, though a necessary corollary from Dr. Anstie's doctrines, is in no sense Dr. Anstie's argument. We are ourselves solely responsible for it.