f he has been a really confirmed, systematic
smoker, he may have a very uncomfortable three weeks after he stops, but
soon after that the time will come when he can stay in a room where
others are smoking and not even desire to join them, which he could
never have done before. He will have the advantage that he is definitely
less likely to die of cancer of the mouth, more especially cancer of the
tongue. That is a point which will affect his wife as well as himself.
He will save a quite remarkable sum of money, and since object lessons
are very valuable, he may follow the suggestion to lay it out in the
form of books, as time goes on, though perhaps my reader can give him
better advice from the point of view of the future housekeeper.
Of course there is the point of view expressed in a poem of Mr.
Kipling's:
"A woman is only a woman,
But a good cigar is a smoke."
If a man takes that point of view he is not good enough for a woman, I
think; she may remember Dogberry, Take no note of him but let him go ...
and thank God she is rid of a ---- fool.
Certainly, I am not saying anything which will be grateful to all ears,
but while we are at it, and since this book is written in the interests
of women, I must say what I believe. I counsel the girl to stop her
lover's smoking; a thousandfold more strongly would I counsel her to
stop his drinking. In a former volume on eugenics, some of the effects
of parental drinking have been dealt with at length, and that subject
need not be returned to here. But also from the point of view of the
individual, a girl may be counselled to stop her lover's drinking. An
excellent eugenic motto for a girl, as my friend Canon Horsley pointed
out in discussing my paper on this subject read before the Society for
the Study of Inebriety in 1909, is "the lips that touch liquor shall
never touch mine."
There are always plenty of people to sneer at the teetotaler; people who
make money out of drink naturally do so; people who drink themselves
naturally do so; the unmarried girl may do so, thinking that the
teetotaler is a prig and not quite a man. _But there is one great class
of the community, the most important of all, which does not sneer at
teetotalers, and that is the wives._ They know better, nay, they know
best, and their verdict stands and will remain against that of all
others. I am now addressing the girl who may become a wife, and I tell
her most solemnly that from her point of
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