There is no doubt that tobacco, if much used by persons of lethargic temperament, is bad from the very nature of the herb, but your hot and sanguine temper
may be much improved thereby. Instances in abundance occur where smoking really to excess, has not been accompanied by any injury to the smoker: not that for one moment we would here defend such practices. Men have lived to a good old age who have done so. The author’s father died at the age of 72: he had been twelve hours a day in a tobacco-manufactory for nearly fifty years; and he both smoked and chewed while busy in the labours of the workshop, sometimes amid a dense cloud of steam from drying the damp tobacco over the stoves; and his health and appetite were perfect to the day of his death; he was a model of muscular and stomachic energy; cheap cigarettes – in which his son, who neither smokes, snuffs, nor chews, by no means rivals him or does him credit. But we may best conclude with the following very sensible remarks.
Some physicians have been pleased to ascribe pernicious effects to the use of tobacco, upon about as good evidence as a gipsy tells fortunes by counting the furrows on the palm of a country girl’s hand. A correspondent favours us with an extract from a paper read before the British Association at Southampton, in which a truly horrid train of evils is traced to ‘ the continuous use of this poisonous substance.’ The poison, it would seeni, ‘ pervades the digestive and respiratory system,’ ‘ the circulating system and the nervous system,’ ‘ diminishing the moral and intellectual powers.’ Instead of all this detail, and much more of the same sort, why did not the learned essayist say at once that the baneful drug pervaded ‘ soul and body? ‘ With ‘ death in the pot’ by one set of philosophers, and ‘ death in the pipe’ by another, the wonder only is how we come to be alive at all; and the greater still, how we come to live longer than our ancestors of the reign of King Henry the Eighth, who never saw and never heard of a tobacco plant. Three hundred years ago a few American savages only consumed tobacco, and now it is consumed by all mankind, being the only commodity common to the consumption of all races and all social conditions. Buy Marlboro cigarettes – Are our lives shorter, our morals worse, or our intellects weaker, that for the better part of three centuries ‘ the poisonous drug,’ according to this hypothesis, has been circulating through the veins of ourselves and our forefathers?
Men of every race and of every climate have been using stimulants of one sort or another from the days of Noah, and probably will continue to do so for the next four thousand years, in spite of chair or pulpit. The question to decide is which stimulant is most innocuous, and, after tea and coffee, we have no hesitation in ranking tobacco, for we are not to be frightened out of our wits by Dr. Laycock’s awful array of terrors, attested though they be ‘ by experiments demonstrating the physiological action of the drug on animals,’—that is, experiments to show that what may be injurious to a clog that dies of old age at sixteen, and to a rabbit which breeds seven times a year, and hardly lives five, must be equally so to a creature that lives seventy or eighty years, and whose ingenuity has altered the very face of the planet he dwells on.
