I have no desire to moralize upon the subject of tobacco. I am not a moralist, but a practical student of cause and effect, urging the elimination of bad causes so that bad effects may be eliminated in turn. A very wide experience in studying the result of the use of narcotics has convinced me that the total harm done by tobacco is greater than that done by alcohol or drugs. Nothing else at the present time is contributing so surely to the degeneration of mankind as tobacco, because, while its damage is less immediately acute than that done by alcohol or habit-forming drugs, it is, aside from its own evil effects, a tremendous contributory factor to the use of both. There is nothing to be said in its favor save that it gives pleasure, and this argument has no more force in the case of tobacco than in the case of opium. Any man who uses tobacco poisons himself, and the very openness and permissibility of the vice serve to make the process of self-poisoning dangerous to the public as well. To sum up, the tobacco habit is useless and harmful to the man who yields to it; it is malodorous and filthy, and therefore an infringement upon the rights and comforts of others. Its relation to alcohol is direct and intimate. When an alcoholic comes to me for treatment, I do not regard my chances of success with him as good unless I can make him see that to abandon smoking is a necessary step in his treatment. My deductions concerning the intimate relationship between the use of tobacco and liquors are the result of years of observation and study. And if it is true that no man whose system is alcoholic is fit to be the father of a child, it is no less true that the habitual smoker is also unworthy to be a guardian of his kind. The alcoholic fiend almost invariably becomes the parent of children provided with defective nervous systems, of children as definitely deformed nervously as they would be physically if born with club-feet or hare-lips. CHAPTER X THE SANATORIUM There is no class of patients in the world to whom the physician, and especially the physician who conducts a sanatorium, can offer so good an excuse for long-continued treatment as to those addicted to the use of drugs. It is certain that the person who makes a weekly charge to such patients is rarely honest with them or tries to shorten their stay. Several years ago I freely and without reservation gave all the details of my treatment to the medical world, and though many institutions have endeavored to install it as a part of their own curative policy, most have failed. The failure may be attributed principally, if not wholly, to the fact that few have also adopted the necessary principle of a fixed charge, without regard to the length of time the patient is under treatment. The weekly charge, with its attendant temptation to keep the patient as long as possible, has invariably defeated all possibilities of success.