32 ANTI-TOBACCO. 



Question, further says : " All medical men agree that all 

 smoking by the young is excess, and is the sure 

 forerunner of dyspeptic horrors. It is probably the 

 greatest source of physical evil that the next generation 

 will have to lament ; for its witcheries are so seductive 

 that the victim is willing to attribute to any cause, rather 

 than the true one, the mischief which it is working on his 

 constitution. The common seqiielce — the shaking hand 

 and palpitating heart, the impaired digestion, the inter- 

 mittent pulse — are complacently ascribed to overwork, to 

 the railway speed at which we live, to the incessant de- 

 mands made upon our powers by a world which is ' too 

 much with us for resistance to importunities that never 

 cease.' Like father like son. The fathers have eaten 

 sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge. 

 The indulgence in tobacco by our youth and young men 

 will affect not only themselves, but the future race of Eng- 

 land. Fortunately for us, it is a vice almost entirely mas- 

 culine. If the daughters of England were to commence 

 weakening their vital forces by the use of nicotine, we 

 should find the children of another generation with a 

 hereditary taste for poison, and a diminished power of 

 resisting its inroads ; they would be unhealthy, dyspeptic, 

 and nervous." 



Dr. Richardson says : " I do not hesitate to say that if a 

 community of both sexes, whose progenitors were finely 

 formed and powerful, were to be trained to the early 

 practice of smoking, and if marriage were confined to 

 the smokers, an apparently new and a physically inferior 

 race of men and women would be bred up." 



