Smoking and Drinking

by James Parton

To this weighty and decisive objection minor ones may be added. The bother and vexation arising from the pipe were very great during the campaigns of the late war. Half the time the smokers, being deprived of their accustomed stimulant, were in that state of uneasy longing which smokers and other stimulators know. Men were shot during the war merely because they would strike a light and smoke. The desire sometimes overcame all considerations of prudence and soldierly duty. A man out on picket, of a chilly night, knowing perfectly well that lighting his pipe would have the twofold effect of revealing his presence and inviting a bullet, was often unable to resist the temptation. Many men, too, risked capture in seeking what smokers call "a little fire." A fine, stalwart officer of a Minnesota regiment, whose natural forces, if he had given nature a fair chance, would have been abundantly sufficient for him without the aid of any stimulant, has told me there were nights when he would have gladly given a month's pay for a light. Readers probably remember the incident related in the newspapers of one of our smoking generals, who, after being defeated by the enemy, heard of the arrival of gunboats which assured his safety, and promised to restore his fortunes. The first thing he did was to send an aid on board a gunboat to ask if they had any cigars. He was right in so doing. It was a piece of strategy necessitated by the circumstances. Let any man who has been in the habit of smoking ten to twenty cigars a day be suddenly deprived of them at a time when there is a great strain upon body and mind, and he will find himself reduced to a state bordering upon imbecility. Knowing what I know of the smoking habits of some officers of high rank, I should tremble for the success of any difficult operation, to be conducted by them in presence of an enemy, if their cigars had given out the evening before; nor could a spy do his employers a better service than to creep into the tents of some generals the night before an engagement, and throw all their cigars and tobacco into a pail of water.

Of all men, therefore, the soldier is the very last man who could find his account in a practice which lowers the tone of his health, reduces his power of endurance, litters his knapsack, pesters him with a system of flints and tinder, and endangers his efficiency in critical moments. If all the world smoked, still the soldier should abstain.

Sailors and other prisoners experience so many dull hours, and possess so many unused faculties, that some cordial haters of tobacco have thought that such persons might be justified in a habit which only lessens what they have in superfluity. In other words, sailors, being in a situation extremely unfavorable to spiritual life, ought not merely to yield to the lowering influence of the forecastle, but add to it one more benumbing circumstance. On the contrary, they ought to strive mightily against the paralyzing effects of monotony,—not give up to them, still less aggravate them. There is no reason, in the nature of things, why a sailor, after a three years' voyage, should not step on shore a man more alert in body and mind than when he sailed, and all alive to communicate the new knowledge he has acquired and the wonders he has seen. Why should he go round this beautiful world drugged?

We must, therefore, add the sailor to the hod-carrier and the soldier, and respectfully take away his pipe. I select these classes, because they are supposed most to need artificial solace, and to be most capable of enduring the wear and tear of a vicious habit. Each of these classes also can smoke without much offending others, and each is provided with an "expectoratoon" which disgusts no one. The hod-carrier and the soldier have the earth and the sailor the ocean. But, for all that, the pipe is an injury to them. Every man of them would be better without it.

But if we must deny them the false solace of their pipe, what can be said of the all-but-universal smoking of persons supposed to be more refined than they, and whose occupations furnish them no pretence of an excuse? We now see painters in their studios smoking while they paint, and sculptors pegging away at the marble with a pipe in their mouths. Clergymen hurry out of church to find momentary relief for their tired throats in an ecstatic smoke, and carry into the apartment of fair invalids the odor of ex-cigars. How it may be in other cities I know not, but in New York a parishioner who wishes to confer upon his clergyman a real pleasure can hardly do a safer thing than send him a thousand cigars of a good clerical brand. It is particularly agreeable to a clergyman to receive a present which supplies him with a luxury he loves, but in which he knows in his inmost soul he ought not to indulge. No matter for all his fine arguments, there is not one clergyman in ten that succeeds in this short life in reducing his conscience to such a degree of obtuseness that he can buy a box of cigars (at present prices) without a qualm of self-reproach. Editors, writers for the press, reporters, and others who haunt the places where newspapers are made, are smokers, except a few controlling men, and a few more who are on the way to become such. Most of the authors whose names are familiar to the public smoke steadily; even the poets most beloved do so. Philosophers have taken to the pipe of late years. Mr. Dickens, they say, toys with a cigar occasionally, but can hardly be reckoned among the smokers, and never touches a cigar when he has a serious task on hand. Mr. Prescott smoked, and O, how he loved his cigar! It was he who, when his physician had limited him to one cigar a day, ran all over Paris in quest of the largest cigars that Europe could furnish. In my smoking days I should have done the same. Thackeray smoked; he was very particular in his smoking; the scent of a bad cigar was an abomination to him. That Byron smoked, and loved "the naked beauties" of tobacco, he has told us in the most alluring verses the weed has ever inspired. Milton, Locke, Raleigh, Ben Jonson, Izaak Walton, Addison, Steele, Bolingbroke, Burns, Campbell, Scott, Talfourd, Christopher North, Lamb, were all smokers at some part of their lives. Among our Presidents, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, General Jackson, and probably many others, were smokers. Daniel Webster once smoked. Henry Clay, down to a late period of his life, chewed, smoked, and took snuff, but never approved of either practice, and stopped two of them. General Grant smokes, but regrets that he does, and has reduced his daily allowance of cigars. Edwin Booth smokes, as do most of the gentlemen of his arduous profession. Probably a majority of the physicians and surgeons in the United States, under forty years of age, are smokers; and who ever knew a medical student that did not smoke furiously? This, perhaps, is not to be wondered at, since doctors live upon the bodily sins of mankind.

The question is, Does it pay these gentlemen to smoke? They know it does not. It would be gross arrogance in any individual to lift up his voice in rebuke of so many illustrious persons, but for the fact that there is scarcely one of them who does not feel that the practice is wrong, or, at least, absurd. Almost all confirmed smokers will go so far as to admit that they wish they had never acquired the habit. Few of them desire their boys to acquire it. None recommend it to other men. Almost all smokers, who are not Turks, Chinamen, or Indians, appreciate at once the wisdom of Sir Isaac Newton's reply to one who asked him why he never smoked a pipe. "Because," said he "I am unwilling to make to myself any necessities." Nor can any intelligent smoker doubt that the fumes of tobacco are hostile to the vital principle. We smokers and ex-smokers all remember how our first cigar sickened us; we have all experienced various ill effects from what smokers call "smoking too much"; and very many smokers have, once or twice in their lives, risen in revolt against their tyrant, given away their pipes, and lived free men long enough to become conscious that their whole being had been torpid, and was alive again. No, no! let who will deny that smoking is unfriendly to life, and friendly to all that wars upon life, smokers will not question it, unless they are very ignorant indeed, or very young. It will be of no avail to talk to them of the man who lived to be a hundred years old and had smoked to excess for half a century. Smokers have that within which keeps them well in mind that smoking is pernicious. If there are any smokers who doubt it, it is the few whom smoke is rapidly killing; such, for example, as the interesting professional men who smoke an excellent quality of cigars and "break down" before they are thirty-five. It is not honest, legitimate hard work that breaks so many people down in the prime of life. It is bad habits.

Smoking is a barbarism. This is the main argument against what is termed moderate smoking. There is something in the practice that allies a man with barbarians, and constantly tends to make him think and talk like a barbarian. Being at New Haven last September, a day or two before the opening of the term at Yale College, I sat in one of the public rooms of the hotel late one evening, hoping some students would come in, that I might see what sort of people college students are in these times. Yale College hath a pleasant seat. Who can stroll about upon that beautiful College Green, under those majestic elms, without envying the youth who are able to spend four long years of this troublesome life in the tranquil acquisition of knowledge amid scenes so refined and engaging? The visitor is bewitched with a wild desire to give the college two or three million dollars immediately, to enable it to become, in all respects, what it desires, aims, and intends to become. Visions of the noble Athenian youth thronging about the sages of eld, and learning wisdom from their lips, flit through his mind, as he wanders among the buildings of the college, and dodges the colored men who are beating carpets and carrying furniture. In this exalted frame of mind, suppose the stranger seated in the room of the hotel just mentioned. In the middle of the small apartment sat one fat, good-humored, uneducated man of fifty, smoking a cigar,—about such a man as we expect to find in the "office" of a large livery stable. At half past ten a young man strolled in, smoking, who addressed the elder by a military title, and began a slangy conversation with him upon the great New Haven subject,—boat-racing. About eleven, three or four other young men came in, to whom cigars were furnished by the military chieftain. All together they blew a very respectable cloud, and the conversation, being so strongly reinforced, became more animated. Boating was still the principal theme. The singular merits of Pittsburg oars were discussed. A warm dispute arose as to who was the builder of a certain boat that had won a race three years ago. Much admiration was expressed for the muscle, the nerve, and, above all, for the style and method, of the crew of the Harvard boat, which had beaten the Yale boat a few weeks before.

Nevertheless, it did not occur to me that these smoking and damning gentlemen could be members of the college. I supposed they were young loafers of the town, who took an interest in the pleasures of the students, and were exchanging opinions thereon with their natural chief, the lord of the stable. At length one said to another, "Will Jones be here this week?" The reply was: "No, I wrote to the fellow; but, damn him, he says he can't get here till next Thursday." "Why, what's the matter with the cuss?" "O, he's had the fever and ague, and he says there's no pull in him." This led me to suspect that these young fellows were the envied youths of whom I had been dreaming under the elms,—a suspicion which the subsequent conversation soon confirmed. There was nothing wrong or harmful in the subject of their talk. The remarkable circumstance was, that all the difference which naturally exists, and naturally appears, between an educated and an uneducated person was obliterated; and it seemed, too, that the smoke was the "common element" in which the two were blended. It was the cigar that kept the students there talking boat till midnight with an elderly ignoramus, and it was the cigar that was always drawing them down to his level. If he had not handed round his cigar-case, they would have exhausted all the natural interest of the subject in a few minutes, and gone home to bed. All of them, too, as it happened, confessed that smoking lessens the power of a man to row a boat, and lamented that a certain student would be lost to the crack crew from his unwillingness to give up his pipe.

Smoking lures and detains men from the society of ladies. This herding of men into clubs, these dinners to which men only are invited, the late sitting at the table after the ladies have withdrawn, the gathering of male guests into some smoking-room, apart from the ladies of the party,—is not the cigar chiefly responsible for these atrocities? Men are not society; women are not society: society is the mingling of the two sexes in such a way that each restrains and inspires the other. That community is already far gone in degeneracy in which men prefer to band together by themselves, in which men do not crave the society of ladies, and value it as the chief charm of existence. "What is the real attraction of these gorgeous establishments?" I asked, the other evening, of an acquaintance who was about to enter one of the new club-houses on Fifth Avenue. His reply was: "No women can enter them! Once within these sacred walls, we are safe from everything that wears a petticoat!" Are we getting to be Turks? The Turks shut women in; we shut them out. The Turks build harems for their women; but we find it necessary to abandon to women our abodes, and construct harems for ourselves.

Humiliating as the truth is, it must be confessed, tobacco is woman's rival, her successful rival. It is the cigar and the pipe (it used to be wine and punch) that enable men to endure one another during the whole of a long evening. Remove from every club-house all the means of intoxication,—i.e. all the wine and tobacco,—and seven out of every ten of them would cease to exist in one year. Men would come together for a few evenings, as usual, talk over the evening papers, yawn and go away, perhaps go home,—a place which our confirmed clubbists only know as a convenience for sleeping and breakfasting. One of the worst effects of smoking is that it deadens our susceptibility to tedium, and enables us to keep on enduring what we ought to war against and overcome. It is drunken people who "won't go home till morning." Tyrants and oppressors are wrong in drawing so much revenue from tobacco; they ought rather to give it away, for it tends to enable people to sit down content under every kind of oppression.