zed and tobacco in some
form or another is used by almost every nation. The last development
in the form of tobacco using was the cigarette rolled between the
fingers, and the worst form of the cigarette is the manufactured
article sold in cheap packages and freely used by boys who in many
cases have not reached their teens.

The manufactured American cigarette seems to be especially deadly in
its effect. It is said to contain five and one-half per cent. of
nicotine, or more than twice as much as the Cuban-made cigarette
contains, and more than six times as much as is contained in the
Turkish cigarette.

I am not going to quarrel with the use of tobacco in general by mature
men. He who has come to man's estate is free to decide for himself
whether he shall force a poison on his revolting stomach; for the
nausea that follows the first use of tobacco is the stomach's attempt
to eject the poison which has been absorbed from pipe, cigar, or
cigarette. The grown man, too, is able to determine whether he wants
to pay the tax which the use of tobacco levies upon his time, his
health, his income and his prosperity. The most that can be said of
the use of tobacco is that if habitual users of the narcotic weed are
successful in life they must be successful in spite of the use of
tobacco and not because of it; for it is opposed to both reason and
common sense that the habitual use of a poison in any form should
promote the development and exercise of the faculties whose energetic
use is essential to success.

What I desire to do is to warn the boy, the growing youth, of the
baneful influence of the cigarette on minds yet unformed, on bodies yet
in process of development.

The danger of the cigarette to the growing boy lies first in the fact
that it poisons the body. That it does not kill at the outset is due
to the fact that the dose is small and so slowly increased that the
body gradually accommodates itself to this poison as it does to
strychnine, arsenic, opium, and other poisons. But all the time there
is a slow but steady process of physical degeneration. The digestion
is affected, the heart is overtaxed, liver and bowels are deranged in
their functions, and as the poison spreads throughout the system there
is a gradual physical deterioration which is marked alike in the
countenance and in the carriage of the body. Any person who cares to
do so may prove for himself the poisonous nature of nicotine which is
der