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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Personal Volume

Drink and Smoking

Drink and Smoking.

Our youths should be in the open air, and in the sunlight, as much as possible. They should be encouraged to play outdoor games and to lead an out-door life. They must learn that indulgence in alcohol or tobacco or other drugs tends to physical degeneration, and not to the strengthening of their powers. This indulgence in the drug habit must be given up if we are to maintain a healthy race. The liquor question is prominently before our people, and the point of view regarding alcohol has completely changed during the past twenty years. Alcohol is of no use but an injury to a healthy person, and is rarely required by one who is sick. How long, I wonder, is the alcohol habit to be allowed to injure our race? There is another evil that is increasing amongst our young people—the smoking of cigarettes. I have on several occasions in my walks from my house to my chambers counted the number of youths. I have seen smoking, and I have been ap- page 10 palled at the number. In one day I noticed eighty per cent of youths dressed in khaki smoking cigarettes, and on several days I have noticed a majority of those going to offices and shops puffing away at cigarettes and pipes. It is a habit that is most harmful. Elbert Hubbard—and no one was more favourable to youths having amusement and fun—denounced the cigarette habit, and I quote a sentence or two from his very important pamphlet, "The Cigarettist." He said:—"Cigarette smokers art often active, alert, competent men. They are quick to see an opportunity, ready to take advantage of it, appreciative, sympathetic, kind. But when you see such a one, he is in his prime, at his best; his star is at the zenith., not on the horizon or at nadir. Never again will he be as much of a man as he is now. His future lies behind. He is not growing into a better man. He is not in the line of evolution. If you want a man who will train on, flee the cigarettist as you would a pestilence. He will surely disappoint you. And the better and brighter your young man, the faster his descent to Avernus.

Cigarette-smoking is all right until the habit begins foreclosure proceedings, then Reelzebub himself (prince of lawyers) cannot vacate them—you go to the devil's auction."

Do we appreciate the vast number of cigarettes on which duty is paid for home consumption every year? For nine months of 1918 there were 616, 413lb weight of [unclear: cigarettes enteren] for home consumption—the number would be approximately 380,000,000; and for the whole year, if there was the same rate of consumption, there would be about 500,000,000 500,000,000. With duty added the cost of tobacco per annum, including cigarettes, etc., is about one and a quarter million pounds, and if we add to that vast amount importers' profits, and expenses, and retailers' profits and charges. I should think another quarter of a mil- page 11 lion would be a moderate estimate, and that would meun a sum of £1,500,000 spent on tobacco.

The annual cost of alcohol is about four millions: all this is waste and tends to inefficiency. Dr. Kellog, in a lecture recently deli vered in New York before the National Associations of Life Underwriters stated that the mortality of moderate drinkers is double that of abstainers, and that the records of the New England Mutual Life Insurance Company, covering a period of 60 years, show that the mortality of smokers is 57.6 Per cent. greater than that of non-smokers. From a mere economic point of view we cannot afford the waste that is going on in the use of alcohol and tobacco in this country. It is now about £5,000,000. Even if indulgence in these two drugs were not harmful, their use is indefensible, for they do not make our people efficient and they are a waste of money. Neithet alcohol nor tobaccois a necessity. An incident in Sir Isaac Newton 's life might be recalled in this connection: who, when he was asked why he never smoked, replied, "I am unwilling to make to myself any necessities."