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EXPENSIVENESS OF TOBACCO-USING.

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it cannot be much if any less than one-fourth of the sum total. Here, then, are five hundred millions a year wasted on the "filthy weed." It is, perhaps, useless, yet it is interesting to speculate concerning the amount of good which might be done were this sum devoted to useful purposes. It would certainly go very far toward providing for every pauper, educating every child, and reforming every criminal, on the earth. Several years ago a writer in Blackwood's Magazine computed the whole amount of tobacco grown on the face of the globe at not less than two million tons-four thousand millions of pounds. The price paid for tobacco by consumers, including all varieties, must exceed twenty-five cents a pound. Choice brands have been sold at auction in Kentucky, quite recently, for one dollar to one dollar and fifty cents per pound; so that, probably, if we should estimate the whole cost of the tobacco used in the world at one thousand millions of dollars annually, we should be more likely to be within than outside of the truth. Then there is the loss of hundreds of thousands of acres of land desecrated to its cultivation, and the loss of the time of hundreds of thousands of persons engaged in its manufacture and sale.

A curious statistician has calculated that the expenditures, directly and indirectly consequent on tobacco-using, amount, in a single century, to a 6

Tobacco-Using.

sum equal to all the property on the earth. If the money expended for tobacco were to be placed at interest, and the interest compounded semi-annually, it would more than justify this seemingly extravagant calculation. If a person smokes half a dozen cigars daily, they must cost him not far from fifty cents. This, at compound interest, would amount, in thirty years, to something like ten thousand dollars. Three hundred millions of smokers at this rate, would waste in a single generation the fabulous sum of $3,000,000,000,000; and in a century a sum quite beyond all ordinary comprehension.

Many college students expend for cigars more money than their board bill amounts to. I have known a poor mechanic, with his wife, children, and furniture, turned into the street for non-payment of rent, when his cigar bill for the quarter amounted to more than his indebtedness to his landlord.*

These are serious thoughts for the toiling millions, on whom the chief burdens of the extravagance and dissipations of all classes fall. Whatever is used or wasted, they must produce it. If all the property of the earth is wasted in riotous

*The money expended for cigars by thousands of industrious laborers, mechanics, and artisans, is just the difference between comfort, competence, and a happy home, and a life of poverty and degradation on the part of the parents, and, not unfrequently, of ignorance and vice on the part of the children.

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living, sensuality, and debauchery, once in a century, or oftener, they must reproduce it, When the laboring masses emancipate themselves from slavery to tobacco and alcohol, they will very soon thereafter solve the vexed question of Labor and Capital, for they will be independent pecuniarily, and can dictate their own terms.

CONCLUSION.

Perhaps it would be difficult to sum up the nature, "properties," and effects, of tobacco-using more pithily or pertinently than was done long ago in the closing sentence of King James' "Counterblast to Tobacco."

"It is a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and, in the black, stinking fumes thereof, nearest resembling the horrible stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless."

To which may be added the concluding verse of the description of tobacco and its votaries by Joshua Sylvester, the poet and contemporary of James I.:

"If then tobacco-using be good, how is't
That lewdest, loosest, basest, foolishest,
The most unthrifty, most intemperate,
Most vicious, most debauched, most desperate,
Pursue it most; the wisest and the best
Abhor it, shun it, flee it as a pest?

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THE REMEDY.

"Touch not, taste not, handle not." Do not think for a moment of substitutes. Abandon the foul thing at once and forever. Do not try abstinence as an experiment, but adopt it as a duty, a principle, a necessity. Differences of opinion exist, and much discussion has been had on the question, whether it is better to abandon the habit of tobacco-using at once, or leave off by degrees. My answer is, Leave off at once. The experiment has been thoroughly tested, in cases of liquordrinkers, of leaving off gradually or suddenly, and the result has always been in favor of breaking off at once.

"Dr. Day, the Superintendent of the Inebriate Asylum, publishes a letter, in which he advocates the practice of totally withdrawing from the habitual drinker all liquor, in opposition to the prevalent idea that the patient must be gradually weaned from the use of alcoholic substances, and founds his assertion on the fact that he has treated 2,500 cases of inebriety during the past ten years. He believes that a man who has been in the habit of drinking a quart of liquor per day will suffer more by being allowed only a pint and gradually less within the same lapse of time, than he will if he is kept altogether from the use of it. The blood of such patients is, in his opinion, poisoned by the substances which alcoholic liquors contain,

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and he does not, therefore, see the necessity of administering any more of such poison, even in infinitesimal doses. He believes that nothing short of absolute abstinence will keep the inebriate cured after he is raised up from his former life of degradation."

The morbid desire for tobacco will be overcome with much less suffering on the whole by discarding the poison at once. The least indulgence perpetuates the disordered condition of the nervous system on which the desire depends. There is no safety for the patient until the morbid irritability of the nervous system is subdued, and its normal sensibility restored; and this can never be accomplished so long as the least particle of tobacco is habitually used. An infinitesimal dose-the least quantity that the organic instincts can appreciate —is sufficient to prolong forever the shattered state of the nervous system; and, until this is restored, the patient is not safe for a moment. Until then, he can have no self-sustaining will-power. Until then, the smell of tobacco, or the sight of a cigar, may reproduce the morbid craving with irresistible force.

Much, however, may be done to mitigate the miseries of the sufferer during his transition state; and having had a large experience in the management of these cases, I may confidently venture the following practical suggestions:

For a few days the patient should be entirely

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