We come next to a very tender point with reformers, the laryngeal cough and failing voice of the reverend clergy.  The later generations of ministers of this vicinity, as a body, have abandoned tobacco, and yet the evil has not diminished.  An eminent divine of our acquaintance, who does not smoke daily, always finds a cigar relieve a trifling bronchitis, to which he is occasionally subject The curious will find in the “Medical Journal” of this city, for 1839, that quite as much can be said on one side as on the other of this subject.

The minor, rarely the graver affections of the nervous system, do follow the use of tobacco in excess.  We admit this willingly; but we deny these effects to its moderate use by persons of ordinary health and of no peculiar idiosyncrasy.  Numerous cases of paralysis among tobacco-takers in France were traced to the lead in which the preparation was enveloped.

We pass next to what we claim as the effects of moderate tobacco-using, and will take first the evidence of the toxicologists.  Both Pereira and Christison agree that “no well-ascertained ill effects have been shown to result from the habitual practice of smoking.”  Beck, a modern authority, says, “Common observation settles the question, that the moderate and daily use of tobacco does not prove injurious.  This is a general rule”:  and he adds, that exceptions necessarily exist, etc.

The repugnance and nausea which greet the smoker, in his first attempts to use tobacco, are not a stronger argument against it than the fact that the system so soon becomes habituated to these effects is a proof of its essential innocuousness.

Certainly the love of tobacco is not an instinctive appetite, like that for nitrogen and carbon in the form of food.  Man was not born with a cigar in his mouth, and it is not certain that the Nicotiana tabacum flourished in the Garden of Eden.  But history proves the existence of an instinct among all races—­call it depraved, if you will, the fact remains—­leading them to employ narcotics.  And narcotics all nations have sought and found.  We venture to affirm that tobacco is harmless as any.  The betel and the hop can alone compare with it in this respect; and the hop is not a narcotic which satisfies alone; others are used with it.  Opium and Indian hemp are not to be mentioned in comparison; while coca, in excess, is much more hurtful.

Tobacco may more properly be called a sedative than a narcotic.  Opium, the type of the latter class, is in its primary action excitant, but secondarily narcotic.  The opium-eaters are familiar with this, and learn by experience to regulate the dose so as to prolong the first and shorten the second effects, as much as possible.

Tobacco, on the other hand, is primarily sedative and relaxing.  A high authority says of its physiological action:—­

“First, That its greater and first effect is to assuage and allay and soothe the system in general.