Smoking, moreover, makes men slaves. The Turks and Persians are great smokers, and they live under a despotic form of government. Q.E.D. The extreme liberality of Oriental institutions _before_ the introduction of tobacco Mr. Parton probably thinks so well known as not to require mention. But still worse, the Turks and Persians are great despisers of women; and this is evidently because they smoke. For woman and tobacco are natural enemies. The most perfect of men, the "highly-groomed" Goethe--as Mr. Parton elegantly calls him--loved women and hated tobacco. This aspect of the question is really a serious one. Tobacco, says our reformer, is woman's rival,--and her successful rival; therefore she hates it. For as Mr. Parton, with profound insight into the mysteries of the feminine character, gravely observes, "women do not disapprove their rivals; they hate them." This "ridiculous brown leaf," then, is not only in general the cause of all evil, but in particular it is the foe of woman. "It takes off the edge of virility"!![2] It makes us regard woman from the Black Crook point of view. If it had not been for tobacco, that wretched phantasmagoria would not have had a run of a dozen nights. "Science" justifies this conjecture, and even if it did not, Mr. Parton intimates that he should make it. Doubtless! [2] When we first read this remark, we took it for a mere burst of impassioned rhetoric; but on second thoughts, it appears to have a meaning. Another knight-errant in physiology charges tobacco with producing "giddiness, sickness, vomiting, vitiated taste of the mouth, loose bowels, diseased liver, congestion of the brain, apoplexy, palsy, mania, loss of memory, amaurosis, deafness, nervousness, _emasculation_, and cowardice." Lizars, _On Tobacco_, p. 29. A goodly array of bugbears, quite aptly illustrating the remark of one of our medical professors, that hygienic reformers, in the length of their lists of imaginary diseases, are excelled only by the itinerant charlatans who vend panaceas. There is, however, no scientific foundation for the statement that tobacco "takes off the edge of virility." The reader who is interested in this question may consult Orfila, _Toxicologie_, tom. II. p. 527; _Annales d'Hygiène_, tom. XXXVIII.; and a Memoir by Laycock in the _London Medical Gazette_, 1846, tom. III.