THE SMOKE-NUISANCE.

Article in "The Continent," October 24, 1883.

"USE your own so as not to injure another's," is a maxim of our law. In another form, more used in common speech, it is, "One's rights end where another's begin." This is no less a rule of courtesy and social convenience than of positive law. The purpose of the present paper is to call attention to one violation of this rule which causes much discomfort to many persons, and has grown to be a great social evil.

Smoking tobacco may be a good thing or a bad thing for the smoker. We will not enter much into that question. What is insisted upon is that he has no right to annoy another with it. It may, for aught I know, add to his power of digestion, or he may think that it sweetens his breath, or imparts a favorite perfume to his clothing, or it may soothe his nerves and soften his temper; but these do not clothe him with the privilege of blowing his smoke into my face or into the air so near me as to reach my mouth and nostrils. My right not to have his smoke is as great as his can be to have it.

That every one of us has the right to breathe the air, and to breathe it as the Dispenser of all good has made it, will hardly be disputed. How, then, does it happen that this right is so often and so rudely infringed? Is it because the indulgence of the appetite has blunted the edge of that delicate sensibility which feels for others, or extinguished that love of justice which would yield to every one the full measure of his rights, or that readiness of self-denial which would rather abridge something of one's own happiness in order to increase the happiness of another?

Going the other day up the lift which leads to my office, I remonstrated with a man who was smoking in the little box, four and a half by seven, where six or eight persons were wedged in. He merely replied that if I did not like smoking I had better walk up the stairs! What sort of a creature should one take this man to be? That he had the manners of a savage with the heart of a brute is evident enough. What can he be in his own

family or in the society which he frequents, if any society will have him, or in his club, if he has been admitted to one? He might have been captain of a slave-ship in the old slave-traders' days, or the overseer, without mercy or remorse, of the plantation described in "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

Smoking has invaded legislative bodies-not merely the committee-rooms, but the halls of legislation. I have seen in the House of Representatives members smoking in their seats. It is prohibited by the rules; but the laxity which prevails in the enforcement of law in general prevails here. The Speaker sits quietly by and sees it going on. The Sergeant-at-Arms evidently winks at it, and his assistants wink, of course, when he winks.

The practice has not yet invaded the courts; but it is not easy to see why it should not, for the places where the laws are administered are no more sacred than the places where the laws are made.

The steamers and railways are in a manner taken possession of. Let me relate an occurrence on one of the Cunarders the summer before the last.

The steamer was full; the weather was hot; we had to sit on deck most of the day, or be half stifled; the seats, all taken, were crowded together; some passengers sea-sick, some reading, some regarding the sea with that look of weariness which made them seem to wish often and often that the voyage were over. Nothing was wanting to the completeness of the picture but the smoker, and he came sure enough, not stealthily, as if he would say, "With your leave," but boldly, cigar in one hand and match in the other, proffering a foretaste of brimstone before the surfeit of tobacco. In half an hour you might count a score or so of men engaged in the same pleasing performance, forsaking in their selfishness the smoking-room set apart for them. Now and then some one ventured with a sigh or a look to express disapprobation. But no matter; the captain saw it; no one interfered. The captain was spoken to. He said he would gladly stop the practice, but could not, though he knew that smoking in the staterooms endangered the safety of the ship. Finally a large number of the company sent him this letter:

"The undersigned, cabin-passengers, who are annoyed by smoking near them when on the deck, venture to ask that some part of the deck may be designated where they may be able to sit without the annoyance of tobaccosmoke."

Next morning the following was posted at the forward end of the ladies' saloon :

"The non-smokers, baving made a request of the captain for a portion of the ship to be assigned to them, the smokers will please not smoke abaft this."

This mild request was not interpreted as an order. Most of the smokers respected it, however; some did not. One man, with a visage as coarse as his gait and manners, persisted in smoking on the after-deck. He was remonstrated with. His reply was, "I am an American citizen, and I will do just what I like." Heaven forbid that he should be taken as a sample of the American citizen! A good democrat or a good republican he assuredly was not, for such a one would have respected the rights, not to say the feelings, of others.

When the steamer reached her wharf in New York, there was of course a great bustle in getting out and arranging the passengers' baggage. Men and women were crowded on the land side, but every third or fourth man was smoking with all his might, regardless of everybody but himself, blowing his unsavory fumes into the faces of men who did not smoke, and who hated the smoke if they did not hate the smoker, and into the faces of women-the matron pale from sea-sickness, or the fair, young girl, peering into the crowd on the wharf, for the form of father, or mother, or friend awaiting her return.

Public dinners and clubs are made places of tribulation more than entertainment for those who do not smoke. They who, in order to do honor to somebody or to some occasion, are drawn into a public dinner, are smoked as if they were so many pieces of bacon. No sooner has the last course of dessert been served, than the cigars are brought in, and the room is enveloped in a cloud of tobacco fume. Probably half the guests do not smoke at all. That does not matter. Those who do smoke have, of course, according to their own theory, the right to drive out, or, as one might put it, smoke out all the rest; so that, with the ever-refilled glasses, the thick vapor blown out of mouths already surcharged with the vegetables and viands, the clatter of plates and the voices of the orators, the sad and submissive non-smoker has, to put it mildly, rather a hard time of it.

In the Forty-second Street Railway Station in New York is a notice bravely displayed in large black letters on a bright ground,

"Smoking strictly prohibited in this room." It goes on nevertheless. The keepers of the place see it, the policemen see it, but they do nothing. I pointed out a smoker to one of these policemen, and called his attention to the notice. He answered that it was not his business to interfere. Indeed, one might be inclined to suspect that the notice was a joke, after all, and that what seemed to be bad grammar was good grammar nevertheless, and signified the act of prohibition rather than the thing prohibited. The mania has as many manifestations as sorcery. Sometimes it is in the form of a cigarette, which a twelve-year-old boy asks a grown-up smoker to light for him in the street; sometimes in the form of a cigar-stump, still lighted, in the hand of the smoker as he gets into an omnibus or car, so enamored with the taste that he has no heart to let even the stump go; sometimes it is in the form of a man breaking the rules of the elevated railways, and lighting his cigar as he leaves the platform or descends the stairs; sometimes in the taste for drink which the smoking begets; sometimes in the opening of a window and puffing covertly out of it, as if nobody else could smell or see.

It does not lessen the wrong which those who do not smoke suffer from those who do that so many of the latter are unconscious of it. It is impossible otherwise to account for the number of amiable gentlemen who, without even asking leave, make no scruple of lighting cigars in places where there are ladies, or gentlemen who not only do not smoke, but who detest the practice. It may be that they think long tolerance has ripened into right, or, without thinking at all, but with an assurance alien to all else they think or do, they assume that what seems good to them must seem good to all. The smoker's creed appears to consist of three articles: First, smoking is good for me. Second, being good for me, it must be good for everybody else. Third, therefore, everybody else shall have it. Now, we non-smokers disbelieve the first, deny the second, and resist the third.

If this creed were a true one, the smoking-car of a railway would be a patch of paradise. Try it, then, with a party of ladies. Let a traveler, smoker or non-smoker, entering a train at a way-station with such a party, chance to light upon this car. He will hurry through it as if it were a place accursed, and the first word to hear from the ladies will be an exclamation of extreme disgust, and, as they step on tiptoe over the grimy floor, lifting their skirts and holding their breath to exclude, if possi

ble, every particle of that cloud of tobacco, thick enough to cut with a knife, they will rejoice on reaching the other door, as those who have escaped from an evil den, so foul, filthy, and fetid is the whole concern.

Why smoking is disagreeable to his neighbor is not for the smoker to ask; that is none of his business. That it is disagreeable, is enough for the neighbor, and it should be enough for him. He may, and no doubt does, like it. It is an old maxim that there is no disputing about tastes. There are people who like unsavory smells. One who has lived all his life by the side of a slaughter-house may take pleasure in the smell of offal; and workmen in the fat-boiling establishments to the east of Murray Hill may like the odor; but, if others do not like it, it is their right not to have it. Reasons for disliking it might be given in plenty if that were necessary. Every puff of tobacco blown out of a man's mouth is loaded with saliva. Now, no one likes to be spit upon. Take a white cambric handkerchief, and hold it so as to breathe into it a little tobacco-smoke. There will be left a sediment of yellow matter resembling ear-wax. This is what you take in when a smoker blows in your face a whiff of his tobacco.

When we pass beyond the domain of taste to consider what is useful or hurtful, each must be allowed to decide for himself. This much, however, we may be permitted to say: Whatever else, good or bad, smoking may do for the smoker, it can hardly be doubted that it calls into exercise the selfish elements of his nature. It takes possession of many men who are in general amiable, generous, and deferential to others, but who are reduced to such a condition of servitude to tobacco that they forget their habitual good manners in other respects, and take no thought of the discomfort they inflict. Some there are, the more scrupulous and the least enslaved, who, before lighting a cigar, will ask their neighbors whether they have any objection, or whether it is disagreeable to them. Why do they ask? If they would reflect a little they would perceive that the mere fact of asking leave is a condemnation of the practice. When one holds a bunch of grapes in his hand, he does not ask his neighbor's leave to eat them. More likely he will ask the neighbor to partake and expect him to eat half of them. If one were to write down what he thinks passing in the minds of the two parties about tobacco, the imaginary dialogue would be in this wise: Q. "Will smok