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performers. In 1832 there were in Paris alone 17, which could
accommodate 21,000 persons. But we do not find that they reformed the
Parisians; and it is reasonable to expect they never will.

Let young men remember, that in this, as well as in many other things,
there is only one point of security, viz. total abstinence.

SECTION IV. _Use of Tobacco._

1. SMOKING.

Smoking has every where, in Europe and America, become a tremendous
evil; and if we except Holland and Germany, nowhere more so than in
this country. Indeed we are already fast treading in the steps of those
countries, and the following vivid description of the miseries which
this filthy practice entails on the Germans will soon be quite
applicable to the people of the United States, unless we can induce the
rising generation to turn the current of public opinion against it.

'This plague, like the Egyptian plague of frogs, is felt every where,
and in every thing. It poisons the streets, the clubs, and the
coffee-houses;--furniture, clothes, equipage, persons, are redolent of
the abomination. It makes even the dulness of the newspapers doubly
narcotic: every eatable and drinkable, all that can be seen, felt,
heard or understood, is saturated with tobacco;--the very air we
breathe is but a conveyance for this poison into the lungs; and every
man, woman, and child, rapidly acquires the complexion of a boiled
chicken. From the hour of their waking, if nine-tenths of their
population can be said to awake at all, to the hour of their lying
down, the pipe is never out of their mouths. One mighty fumigation
reigns, and human nature is smoked dry by tens of thousands of square
miles. The German physiologists compute, that of 20 deaths, between
eighteen and thirty-five years, 10 originate in the waste of the
constitution by smoking.'

This is indeed a horrid picture; but when it is considered that the
best estimates which can be made concur in showing that tobacco, to the
amount of $16,000,000, is consumed in the United States annually, and
that by far the greater part of this is in smoking cigars, there is
certainly room for gloomy apprehensions. What though we do not use the
dirty pipe of the Dutch and Germans? If we only use the _tobacco_, the
mischief is effectually accomplished. Perhaps it were even better that
we should lay out a part of our money for pipes, than to spend the
whole for tobacco.

Smoking is indecent, filthy, and rude, and to many