ON HOW TO GET SOMETHING BY GIVING SOMETHING UP _From a Victim of the Comparative-Statistics Habit_ _My dear Harold_: Can a man go in for tobacco and do his duty by the United States Navy? Life seems to be getting more difficult every day. I can no longer enjoy my after-dinner cigar as I used to. The trouble is not physical. My nerves are in good condition. My heart behaves quite as it should, occasionally rising into my mouth with fear, sometimes sinking toward my diaphragm with anticipation, but for the most part going about its work without attracting notice. I sleep as soundly as I ever did. The quality of the tobacco they put into cigars nowadays may be deteriorating, but I am easy to please. No; the trouble is with my conscience. I simply find it impossible to smoke without feeling that I am recreant to my social obligations. [Illustration] Don’t imagine I am referring to my family. It is old-fashioned practice to show how the money disbursed upon tobacco by the head of a household might buy a home in the suburbs and endowment insurance for the children. To-day the sociological implications of a box of cigars are much more serious. To-day no man of conscience can light his pipe without inflicting injury on the United States Navy. All the comfort goes out of a cigar when one reflects upon what one might be doing for the encouragement of education among the Southern mountaineers. Now and then I like the feel of a cigarette between my lips; but can a man go in for cigarettes as long as the country stands in such bitter need of a comprehensive system of internal waterways? I imagine I am not making myself quite clear. What I mean is that there are so many good causes abroad nowadays, and the advocates of each and every cause have no trouble in showing how easily they might manage to attain the specific thing they are after if only you would consent to sacrifice something that your own heart is rather set upon. Just imagine if all the money that is burned up in tobacco were devoted to the expansion of the fleet! Can there be any doubt that within a year we should take first place among the naval powers? Provided, that is, the English and the Germans and the Japanese did not give up smoking at the same time that we did. It may seem far-fetched to argue any close connection between a ten-cent cigar and a ten-million-dollar dreadnought. That is what I have been trying to say to myself. But I cannot help feeling that if the day of Armageddon does arrive, and the Japanese fleet comes gliding out of Magdalena Bay, and the star of our national destiny goes down into defeat, I shall never be able to forgive myself for the cigar I insisted on lighting every night after the children had been put to bed. As it is, I suffer by anticipation. The Japanese fleet keeps popping out at me from my tobacco-jar.