Tobacco and Alcohol: I. It Does Pay to Smoke. II. The Coming Man Will Drink Wine.Fiske, John
Science
Tobacco and Alcohol: I. It Does Pay to Smoke. II. The Coming Man Will Drink Wine.
Fiske, John
Smoking; Temperance
"If I, at this ten A.M., full of interest in this subject, and eager
to get my view of it upon paper, were to drink a glass of the best
port, Madeira, or sherry, or even a glass of lager-bier, I should
lose the power to continue in three minutes; or, if I persisted in
going on, I should be pretty sure to utter paradox and spurts of
extravagance, which would not bear the cold review of to-morrow
morning. Any one can try this experiment. Take two glasses of wine,
and then immediately apply yourself to the hardest task your mind ever
has to perform, and you will find you cannot do it. Let any student,
just before he sits down to his mathematics, drink a pint of the
purest beer, and he will be painfully conscious of loss of power." Did
it ever dimly occur to Mr. Parton that all men may not be constructed
on exactly the same plan with himself?
We wonder how many drops of "seductive fluid," unwisely taken at the
wrong time of day, are to be held responsible for the following
"spurt" of extravagance: "The time, I hope, is at hand, when an
audience in a theatre, who catch a manager cheating them out of their
fair allowance of fresh air, will not sit and gasp, and inhale
destruction till eleven P.M., and then rush wildly to the street for
relief. They will stop the play; they will tear up the benches, if
necessary; they will throw things on the stage; they will knock a hole
in the wall; they will _have_ the means of breathing, or perish in the
struggle." Is this the way in which "well-groomed" people are expected
to behave? Fancy an audience following this precious bit of advice.
When Mlle. Janauschek, for instance, is finishing the third act of
"Medea" or the second act of "Deborah," amid the tragic solemnity of
the scene, fancy the audience, because of bad air in the theatre,
getting up and flinging their canes and opera-glasses on the stage, in
the heroic struggle for oxygen or death! Fancy four or five hundred
grown-up, educated people behaving in this way! If these are to be the
manners of the Coming Man, we trust it will be long before he comes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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