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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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