We group under this heading a pile of leaves that seem, as they lie upon the desk, to be constantly quivering with horror lest some form of tobacco might be used in their vicinity. We are quite safe critics in this respect, as the weed does not flatter and tone down feelings of the highest propriety, and we write at a pinch, but not in consequence of one. Perhaps it would be presumptuous to hint that we ruminate only “the cud of sweet and bitter fancies.” There was a period in our college career — if considerable careering may be thus strictly designated — when a cloud seemed to us, as to Ixion, loveable: but, profiting by the disappointments of that unenlightened heathen who did not appear to smoke his error, we tried to learn to blow our own cloud. How we used to recline, with eyes half shut in a surmise of pleasure, to wink out of consciousness our one-armed and stiff-runged family rocking-chair, and a much stiffer exercise of differential calculus: for in those days we could not ride to the pure mathematics on a pony or with a coach; and the only “joker” we knew was the instructor who pretended that calculus was learnable. But our efforts at narcotizing the entire absence of cushions to our chair and rank to our course, were always closed suddenly by searing the lips or extinguishing the right eye: we could never learn to shift our cigar along the “hedge of the teeth” with that Olympic abandon of the born smoker; it had to be held with great circumspection, the drift of the curls to be narrowly watched, all talk suspended on pain of choking, all thought centred upon each judicious whiff. We remember faintly that occasionally our delicious repose was marred by a revulsion of feeling that expected to find something timely in the closet: that day we smoked no more, nor read, for that matter, either. On the whole, we never fought our way through the jungly belt of Terai up to the cloud-land where your predestined smoker lies pillowed upon his fatuity, “careless of mankind.” Indeed, it became with us a question whether the pituitary glands would continue to moisten Mrs. Scrimpflint’s otherwise unboltable rations, or whether we should grow up capable of spitting upon any politics or theology we might despise.
We are ready, therefore, to take high ground upon the matter of tobacco, and to declare its essential incompatibility with the moral sense. Here we have “an appeal to Lord Renfrew, the Prince of Wales, on the pernicious eiiects ot his cigar and pipe.” He is addressed as “a prospective monarch,” whose “likeness is among us in daguerreotypes by thousands:” he is told that his habit may not only disable him, but, through him, future kings on his throne, — “we desire no extinction of this royal line” — drop therefore “your meerschaum and its affinities.” If we knew what effect this appeal has had upon the Prince, we should feel more competent to recommend the series of papers to untitled smokers.
Wood-cuts are also pressed into the service of Mr. Trask’s crusade. Here is a picture of a “boy who first smoked a paper cigar, then a grape-vine, then the real article,” — favored child, in these days of oak-leaves and fillings: he is confessing at his mother’s knee, but he does not look haggard enough to satisfy our own vindictive recollections of the vice.
Here are “Twenty Reasons why ministers of the everlasting gospel should not use Tobacco.” And we are told that “dying saints, well nigh suffocated with the poisonous odor, have, with trembling hands, waved pastors from their bedsides.” Alas, Mr. Trask, if dying saints would only wave from their bedsides the suffocating doctrines that their pastors bring, we should be inclined to waive the matter of a smoke whose torment does not ascend forever and ever.
Well might a saint say to his pastor,—
“O, search beyond this earth — search regions of the blest;
Can ye not find some place where we unsmoked may rest?”
But clergymen are warned upon one point of considerable importance. ”Many tobacco-users fall dead suddenly. You may fall dead in your pulpits. Some preachers have.” Yes, how many, and they stay stone-dead, not knowing it, but without having used tobacco! It occurs to us to ask whether in such cases the use of tobacco might not act, as ammoniacal salts, or burnt feathers, and wake the preacher from his deathly swoon. It would be certainly legitimate to try a post-mortem experiment of this nature. Several kinds of Siberian and Flat-head wizards prophesy under fumigation. Let it be tried, as a last resort before sepulture, wherever there is a pulpit whose recumbent has ceased to breathe the breath of life. Goethe has a verse, in his West-Easterly Divan, that hints how the original process of informing bodies with souls, might be cheaply imitated by us with a pinch of snuff alone:
“The Elohim into his nose
With best of spirit breezing,
Some sign of life the creature shows
By hearty fit of sneezing.”
The subject is however too grave for jesting. Wherever under the present condition of the clerical profession, we could find a live minister, we should be tempted, notwithstanding our old grudge at honest smokers, to attribute some etherial influence to his cigar.
But let us not be misunderstood. We like clean and healthy ways. And we like to see a tract upon some pernicious habit written without cant and coarseness, so that laughter might not come in to half betray the cause. These little papers are too evangelical for us, and are pitched to the senses which cannot appreciate “the real article” of tobacco or theology. What benefit, for instance, will the Republic reap from such a verse as this, thrust into the hand on every railroad, and proffered at the street-corners?
“The jaws then give a flirt,
The tongue, too, takes a tuck;
The pucker lets a squirt,
That drains it of the truck.”
J. W.
The Radical was indeed quite radical for its day, edited with what seems a heavy hand by libertarian freethinker Unitarian Sidney H. Morse (brother of Samuel, who had something or other to do with telegraphy). We can find little about the journal, though [Sid] Morse did write a number of early and probably conspiracy-theoretically influential works on the importance of Freemasonry to American history.
Apparently George Trask, the “Anti-smoking Apostle”, was an early and active player in the campaign against tobacco.
The emphasis on “on a pony” is mine; any idea why the phrase occurs at all?