and otherwise disorders the heart." It
is conceded by the medical profession that tobacco causes cancer of the
tongue and lips, dimness of vision, deafness, dyspepsia, bronchitis,
consumption, heart palpitation, spinal weakness, chronic tonsillitis,
paralysis, impotency, apoplexy, and insanity. It is held by some men
that tobacco aids digestion. Dr. McAllister, of Utica, New York, says
that it "weakens the organs of Digestion and assimilation, and at length
plunges one into all the horrors of dyspepsia."

*Tobacco dulls the mind.* It does this not only by wasting the body,
the physical basis of the mind, but it does it through habits of
intellectual idleness, which the user of tobacco naturally forms.
Whoever heard of a first-class loafer who did not e-a-t the weed or burn
it, or both? On the rail train recently we were compelled to ride for
an hour in the smoking-car, which Dr. Talmage has called "the nastiest
place in Christendom." In front of me sat a young man, drawing and
puffing away at a cigar, polluting the entire region about him. In the
short hour enough time was lost by that young man to have carefully read
ten pages of the best standard literature. All this we observed by
an occasional glance from the delightful volume in our own hands. The
ordinary user of tobacco has little taste for reading, little passion
for knowledge, and superficial habits of continued reasoning. His
leisure moments are absorbed in the sense-gratification of the weed. But
if as much attention had been given in acquiring the habit of reading as
had been given in learning the use of tobacco, the most valuable of all
habits would take the place of one of the most useless of all habits.
When we see a person trying to read with a cigar or a pipe in his mouth,
Knowing that nine-tenths of his real consciousness is given to his
smoking, and one-tenth to what he is reading, we are reminded of the
commercial traveler who "wanted to make the show of a library at home,
so he wrote to a book merchant in London, saying: 'Send me six feet of
theology, and about as much metaphysics, and near a yard of civil law in
old folio.'" Not a sentimentalist, a reformer, nor a crank, but Dr. James
Copeland says: "Tobacco weakens the nervous powers, favors a dreamy,
imaginative, and imbecile state of mind, produces indolence and
incapacity for manly or continuous exertion, and sinks its votary into
a state of careless inactivity and selfish enjoyment of vice." P