All cigarets are costly. They destroy things much more valuable than personal property or real estate. They destroy health, character, and the chances of good success in life. These things are more valuable than hills of gold. The cigaret is more deadly than natural death, for it produces a living death and at last flings the ruined soul on the bank of the Lost River in the Kingdom of Eternal Darkness.
Sir Christopher Furness has found that cigaret smoking among boys not only causes deterioration of physique, but "tends to develop lounging habits, with the result that the juvenile smoker's work is less conscientiously done, and he is lacking in sprightliness and alertness. Where, as is often the case," Sir Christopher adds, "the boy smokes clandestinely, habits of deceitfulness will probably be formed." Sir George William's experience as an employer has conclusively proved to him that a boy is a far from satisfactory worker if he smokes, and he says:
The effects of smoking, with its tendency to encourage drinking, are to reduce a lad's energy, to lessen his intellectual capacity, and to weaken his moral character.
The fact that every great public school prohibits smoking among its boys, and punishes offenders with a strong hand, is eloquent of the evil effect tobacco has on the young mind. The Leeds School Board some time ago enlisted the services of eminent medical authorities in its battle against the cigaret, and the Plymouth Board circularized the teachers and parents of the children on the subject. A Committee of the Liverpool School Board which investigated the matter declared that "cigaret smoking affects the system generally, and arrests physical development," and it would be possible to quote thousands of such opinions from the educational side.
It goes without saying that the doctor is the strongest enemy of the cigaret for boys. "All the evidence," says Dr. Andrew Wilson, "points to the undermining of a growing lad's physique by indulgence in tobacco," and Doctor Wilson continues:
Add to this the moral effect—that of rendering the already precocious boy still more precocious, and of turning him into an insufferable prig, and you thus condemn the habit from another point of view.
Sir Henry LittleJohn, the veteran medical officer of health for Edinburgh, has used his great influence against the boy smoker on many grounds, and there is much force in his argument that
the practise is fraught with dangers to society at large, owing to the secrecy with which the habit is carried on, the assembling at nights, the tendency to visit ice-cream shops to assuage the heat of the mouth that has been engendered by the filthy practise, and, in addition, we have ultimately that disregard of the proprieties due to the other sex which is introducing in our midst a laxity of morals, which, in the future, must bear fruit.
Magistrate Crane of New York City says:
Ninety-nine out of a hundred boys between ten and seventeen years of age, who come before me charged with crime, have their fingers disfigured by yellow cigaret stains... The poison in the cigaret seems to get into the system of the boy and destroys all moral fiber.
Tobacco interferes with the functions of the eye, of the heart, and of the kidneys. Tobacco smoking interferes with the development of the boy.