Western Railroad which is part of
the Baltimore and Ohio system, gave orders forbidding the use of
cigarettes by its employees on passenger trains and also notified
passengers that they must not smoke cigarettes in their coaches.

In the call issued for the competitive examination for messenger
service in the Chicago Post-office, sometime since, seven hundred
applicants were informed that only the best equipped boys were wanted
for this service, and that under no circumstances would boys who smoked
cigarettes be employed. Other post-offices have taken a similar stand.

If some one should present you with a most delicately adjusted
chronometer,--one which would not vary a second in a year--do you think
it would pay you to trifle with it, to open the case in the dust, to
leave it out in the rain overnight, or to put in a drop of glue or a
chemical which would ruin the delicacy of its adjustment so that it
would no longer keep good time? Would you think it wise to take such
chances?

But the Creator has given you a matchless machine, so delicately and
wondrously made that it takes a quarter of a century to bring it to
perfection, to complete growth, and yet you presume to trifle with it,
to do all sorts of things which are infinitely worse than leaving your
watch open out of doors overnight, or even in water.

The great object of the watch is to keep time. The supreme purpose of
this marvelous piece of human machinery is power. The watch means
nothing except time. If the human machinery does not produce power, it
is of no use.

The merest trifle will prevent the watch from keeping time; but you
think that you can put anything into your human machinery, that you can
do all sorts of irrational things with it, and yet you expect it to
produce power--to keep perfect time. It is important that the human
machine shall be kept as responsive to the slightest impression or
influence as possible, and the brain should be kept clear so that the
thought may be sharp, biting, gripping, so that the whole mentality
will act with efficiency. And yet you do not hesitate to saturate the
delicate brain-cells with vile drinks, to poison them with nicotine, to
harden them with smoke from the vilest of weeds. You expect the man to
turn out as exquisite work, to do the most delicate things to retain
his exquisite sense of ability notwithstanding the hardening, the
benumbing influence of cigarette poisoning.

Let the boy or youth w