SIGN OF THE TIMES.
It begets Laziness and national Ruin.
Sir Benjamin Brodie, a distinguished physician of London, says, “A large proportion of habitual smokers are rendered lazy and listless, indisposed to bodily and incapable of much mental exertion. Others suffer from depression of the spirits, amounting to hypochondriasis, which smoking relieves for the time, though it aggravates the evil afterwards....
“What will be the result, if this habit be continued by future generations?”
Tobacco is ruining our nation. Its tendency is to make the individual user idle, listless, and imbecile. Individuals make up the nation. Those nations using the most tobacco are the most rapidly deteriorating.
Once the ships of Holland ploughed the waters with a broom at the mast-head, emblematic of her power to sweep the ocean. Behold her now! “Her people self-satisfied, content with their pipes, and the glories once achieved by their grandfathers.” Look at the Mexicans, and the lazzaroni of Italy. “Spain took the lead of civilized nations in the use of tobacco; but since its introduction into that country, the noble Castilian has become degenerated, his moral, intellectual, and physical energies weakened, paralyzed, and debased. The Turks, descendants of the warlike Saracens, are notoriously known as inveterate smokers. And to-day they are characterized as an enervated, lazy, worthless, degenerate people.”
Go about the shops, and bar-rooms, and billiard-halls of our own community, and see our lazzaroni. What class do they principally represent—the active and virtuous, or the idle and vicious?
MY LAZY SMOKING FRIEND.