'It is thus that we see a young man, of good natural abilities, scarcely twenty-three years of age, compelled to lose six of the most valuable years of his life, besides ruining a fair reputation, and bringing disgrace upon his parents and friends, from the apparently harmless desire of seeing dramatic performances. Ought not this to be a warning to others, who are travelling on, imperceptibly in the same road to ruin?'
Theatres are of ancient date. One built of wood, in the time of Cicero and Cæsar, would contain 80,000 persons. The first stone theatre in Rome, was built by Pompey, and would contain 40,000. There are one or two in Europe, at the present time, that will accommodate 4,000 or 5,000.
In England, until 1660, public opinion did not permit females to perform in theatres, but the parts were performed by boys.
If theatres have a reforming tendency, this result might have been expected in France, where they have so long been popular and flourishing. In 1807, there were in France 166 theatres, and 3968 performers. In 1832 there were in Paris alone 17, which could accommodate 21,000 persons. But we do not find that they reformed the Parisians; and it is reasonable to expect they never will.
Let young men remember, that in this, as well as in many other things, there is only one point of security, viz. total abstinence.
Section IV. Use of Tobacco.
1. SMOKING.
Smoking has every where, in Europe and America, become a tremendous evil; and if we except Holland and Germany, nowhere more so than in this country. Indeed we are already fast treading in the steps of those countries, and the following vivid description of the miseries which this filthy practice entails on the Germans will soon be quite applicable to the people of the United States, unless we can induce the rising generation to turn the current of public opinion against it.
'This plague, like the Egyptian plague of frogs, is felt every where, and in every thing. It poisons the streets, the clubs, and the coffee-houses;—furniture, clothes, equipage, persons, are redolent of the abomination. It makes even the dulness of the newspapers doubly narcotic: every eatable and drinkable, all that can be seen, felt, heard or understood, is saturated with tobacco;—the very air we breathe is but a conveyance for this poison into the lungs; and every man, woman, and child, rapidly acquires the complexion of a boiled chicken. From the hour of their waking, if nine-tenths of their population can be said to awake at all, to the hour of their lying down, the pipe is never out of their mouths. One mighty fumigation reigns, and human nature is smoked dry by tens of thousands of square miles. The German physiologists compute, that of 20 deaths, between eighteen and thirty-five years, 10 originate in the waste of the constitution by smoking.'