49}

Cigarettes have been analyzed, and the most physicians and chemists were
surprised to find how much opium is put into them. A tobacconist himself
says that "the extent to which drugs are used in cigarettes is appalling."
"Havana flavoring" for this same purpose is sold everywhere by the thousand
barrels. This flavoring is made from the tonka-bean, which contains a
deadly poison. The wrappers, warranted to be rice paper, are sometimes made
of common paper, and sometimes of the filthy scrapings of ragpickers
bleached white with arsenic. What a thing for human lungs.

The habit burns up good health, good resolutions, good manners, good
memories, good faculties, and often honesty and truthfulness as well.

Cases of epilepsy, insanity and death are frequently reported as the result
of smoking cigarettes, while such physicians as Dr. Lewis Sayre, Dr.
Hammond, and Sir Morell Mackenzie of England, name heart trouble,
blindness, cancer and other diseases as occasioned by it.

Leading physicians of America unanimously condemn {450} cigarette smoking
as "one of the vilest and most destructive evils that ever befell the youth
of any country," declaring that "its direct tendency is a deterioration of
the race."

Look at the pale, wilted complexion of a boy who indulges in excessive
cigarette smoking. It takes no physician to diagnose his case, and death
will surely mark for his own every boy and young man who will follow up the
habit. It is no longer a matter of guess. It is a scientific fact which the
microscope in every case verifies.

* * * * *

{451}

The Dangerous Vices.

[Illustration: INNOCENT YOUTH.]

Few persons are aware of the extent to which masturbation or self-pollution
is practiced by the young of both sexes in civilized society.

SYMPTOMS.

The hollow, sunken eye, the blanched cheek, the withered hands, and
emaciated frame, and the listless life, have other sources than the
ordinary illnesses of all large communities.

When a child, after having given proofs of memory and intelligence,
experiences daily more and more difficulty in retaining and understanding
what is taught him, it is not only from unwillingness and idleness, as is
commonly supposed, but from a disease eating out life itself, brought on by
a self-abuse of the private organs. Besides the slow and progressive
derangement of his or her health, the diminished energy of application, the
languid movement