CONTROVERSIES. 11 



truly horrid train of evils is traced to ' the continuous 

 use of this poisonous substance.' The poison, it would 

 seem, ' pervades the digestive and respiratory system,' 

 ' the circulating system and the nervous system,' ' di- 

 minishing the moral and intellectual powers.' Instead 

 of all this detail, and much more of the same sort, why 

 did not the learned essayist say at once that the 

 baneful drug pervaded ' soul and body ? ' With ' death 

 in the pot ' by one set of philosophers, and ' death in 

 the pipe ' by another, the wonder only is how we come 

 to be alive at all; and the greater still, how we come 

 to live longer than our ancestors of the reign of King 

 Henry the Eighth, who never saw and never heard 

 of a tobacco plant. Three hundred years ago a few 

 American savages only consumed tobacco, and now it 

 is consumed by all mankind, being the only commodity 

 common to the consumption of all races and all social 

 conditions. Are our lives shorter, our morals worse, 

 or our intellects weaker, that for the better part of 

 three centuries ' the poisonous drug,' according to this 

 hypothesis, has been circulating through the veins of 

 ourselves and our forefathers ? 



" Men of every race and of every climate have been 

 using stimulants of one sort or another from the days 

 of Noah, and probably will continue to do so for the 

 next four thousand years, in spite of chair or pulpit. 

 The question to decide is which stimulant is most 

 innocuous, and, after tea and coffee, we have no hesita- 

 tion in ranking tobacco, for we are not to be frightened 

 out of our wits by Dr. Laycock's awful array of terrors, 



