cred weed. Moreover, the Eastern tobacco is as much milder than ours
as are the Continental wines than even those semi-alcoholic mixtures
which prevail at scrupulous communion-tables. And as for German health,
Dr. Schneider declares, in the London "Lancet," that it is because of
smoke that all his educated countrymen wear spectacles, that an immense
amount of consumption is produced in Germany by tobacco, and that
English insurance companies are proverbially cautious in insuring German
lives. Dr. Carlyon gives much the same as his observation in Holland.
These facts may be overstated, but they are at least as good as those
which they answer.

Not much better is the excuse alleged in the social and genial
influences of tobacco. It certainly seems a singular way of opening
the lips for conversation by closing them on a pipe-stem, and it would
rather appear as if Fate designed to gag the smokers and let the
non-smokers talk. But supposing it otherwise, does it not mark a
condition of extreme juvenility in our social development, if no
resources of intellect can enable a half-dozen intelligent men to be
agreeable to each other, without applying the forcing process, by
turning the room into an imperfectly organized chimney? Brilliant women
can be brilliant without either wine or tobacco, and Napoleon always
maintained that without an admixture of feminine wit conversation grew
tame. Are all male beings so much stupider by nature than the other
sex, that men require stimulants and narcotics to make them mutually
endurable?

And as the conversational superiorities of woman disprove the supposed
social inspirations of tobacco, so do her more refined perceptions yet
more emphatically pronounce its doom. Though belles of the less mature
description, eulogistic of sophomores, may stoutly profess that they
dote on the Virginian perfume, yet cultivated womanhood barely tolerates
the choicest tobacco-smoke, even in its freshness, and utterly recoils
from the stale suggestions of yesterday. By whatever enthusiasm misled,
she finds something abhorrent in the very nature of the thing. In vain
did loyal Frenchmen baptize the weed as the queen's own favorite, _Herba
Catherinae Medicae_; it is easier to admit that Catherine de' Medici was
not feminine than that tobacco is. Man also recognizes the antagonism;
there is scarcely a husband in America who would not be converted from
smoking, if his wife resolutely demanded her right of moiety