VI. From a consideration of the mortality which tobacco occasions.
Some of my readers may be startled at this consideration. They
may not have dreamed, even, that tobacco kills any body. So insidious are the effects of this poison, and so insensible have the community been to its abominations, that very few have regarded the use of tobacco as the cause of swelling our bills of mortality. But though appalling, it is nevertheless true, that tobacco carries vast multitudes to the grave, all over our country, every year. Says Dr. Salmon, "I am confident more people have died of apoplexies, since the use of snuff in one year, than have died of that disease in an hundred years before; and most, if not all, whom I have observed to die, of late of that disease, were extreme and constant snuff-takers." The late Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper, of Boston, by constant use of snuff, brought on a disorder of the head, which was thought to have ended his days. A very large quantity of hardened Scotch snuff was found, by a post mortem examination, between the external nose and the brain. The late Gov. Sullivan, speaking of Gov. Hancock, the early President of Congress, says, "Gov. Hancock was an immoderate chewer of tobacco; but being a well-bred man, and a perfect gentleman, he, from a sense of decorum, refrained from spitting in company, or in well-dressed rooms. This produced the habit of swallowing the juice of the tobacco, the consequence of which was, his stomach became inactive, and a natural appetite seldom returned; the agreeable sensations of hunger could not be experienced but by the use of stimulants, to satisfy which he swallowed more food than his digestive powers could dispose of. This derangement in chylification increased his gout, his stomach became paralytic, and he died at the age of fifty-eight."
Again, says Governor Sullivan, "My own brother, the active General Sullivan, began early in life to take snuff. It injured essentially a fine voice which he possessed as a public speaker. When he was an officer in the American army, he carried his snuff loose in his pocket. He said he did this because the opening of a snuff-box in the field of review, or on the field of battle, was inconvenient. At times he had violent pains in the head; the intervals grew shorter and shorter, and the returns more violent, when his sufferings ended in a stroke of palsy, which rendered him insensible to pain, made him helpless and miserable, and lodged him in the grave before he was fifty years of age; and I have no doubt [says the Governor,] but all this sprung from the use of snuff." He adds, "I have known some persons live to old age, in the extravagant use of tobacco; but they bear a small proportion to those who, by the habit of using tobacco, have been swept into the grave in early or middle life."
Professor Silliman mentions two affecting cases of young men, in the Institution with which he is connected, who were carried to an early grave by tobacco. One of them, he says, entered college with an athletic frame; but he acquired the habit of using tobacco, and would sit and smoke by the hour together. His friends tried to persuade him to quit the practice; but he loved his lust, and would have it, live or die: the consequence was, he went down to the grave, a suicide.
One of the German periodicals says, the chief German physiologists compute, that of twenty deaths of men between eighteen and twenty-five, ten, that is, one half, originate in the waste of the constitution by smoking. They declare, also, with much truth, that tobacco burns out the blood, the teeth, the eyes, and the brain.
To this unequivocal testimony, which is confirmed by the observation of every intelligent person who has turned his attention to this matter, much more might be added; but it is unnecessary. How large a proportion of the twenty thousand deaths—reckoning one death to a hundred souls—which occur annually, among the two millions of tobacco consumers in this country, are to be charged to the use of this deadly narcotic, I am unable definitely to determine. If we suppose one quarter of these deaths to be caused by tobacco, it will give us the number of five thousand. Five thousand deaths in these United States, every year from the use of tobacco! and this is doubtless far below the actual number. Five thousand valuable lives sacrificed in this enlightened land, annually, in the use of a dirty plant, that no living creature, except man and the tobacco worm, will touch, or taste, or handle. Five thousand men and women carried to the grave, yearly, by a poisonous weed, which does no good, and which, for filthiness and disgust, scarcely has its parallel in the whole vegetable kingdom. Is there a Christian,—is there a patriot,—is there a friend of humanity,—is there an individual, that values his own probationary existence,—who can look at the sweeping mortality which tobacco brings upon the nation, and longer indulge his attachment to his quid, his pipe or his snuff-box? Is there one who will pause and look at this matter, and not resolve that he will, forthwith, entirely, and forever, abandon a practice which does so much to people the grave?
I maintain my position,
VII.—From a consideration of the apologies of the lovers of tobacco.