The point of objection on the ground of inordinate expense is doubtless better taken, and can be met only by substantial proof that the enormous outlay is a wise one.  Tobacco may be “the anodyne of poverty,” as somebody has said, but it certainly promotes poverty.  This narcotic lulls to sleep all pecuniary economy.  Every pipe may not, indeed, cost so much as that jewelled one seen by Dibdin in Vienna, which was valued at a thousand pounds; or even as the German meerschaum which was passed from mouth to mouth through a whole regiment of soldiers till it was colored to perfection, having never been allowed to cool,—­a bill of one hundred pounds being ultimately rendered for the tobacco consumed.  But how heedlessly men squander money on this pet luxury!  By the report of the English University Commissioners, some ten years ago, a student’s annual tobacco-bill often amounts to forty pounds.  Dr. Solly puts thirty pounds as the lowest annual expenditure of an English smoker, and knows many who spend one hundred and twenty pounds, and one three hundred pounds a year, on tobacco alone.  In this country the facts are hard to obtain, but many a man smokes twelve four-cent cigars a day, and many a man four twelve-cent cigars,—­spending in either case about half a dollar a day and not far from two hundred dollars per annum.  An industrious mechanic earns his two dollars and fifty cents a day or a clerk his eight hundred dollars a year, spends a quarter of it on tobacco, and the rest on his wife, children, and miscellaneous expenses.

But the impotency which marks some of the stock arguments against tobacco extends to most of those in favor of it.  My friend assures me that every one needs some narcotic, that the American brain is too active, and that the influence of tobacco is quieting,—­great is the enjoyment of a comfortable pipe after dinner.  I grant, on observing him at that period, that it appears so.  But I also observe, that, when the placid hour has passed away, his nervous system is more susceptible, his hand more tremulous, his temper more irritable on slight occasions, than during the days when the comfortable pipe chances to be omitted.  The only effect of the narcotic appears, therefore, to be a demand for another narcotic; and there seems no decided advantage over the life of the birds and bees, who appear to keep their nervous systems in tolerably healthy condition with no narcotic at all.

The argument drawn from a comparison of races is no better.  Germans are vigorous and Turks are long-lived, and they are all great smokers.  But certainly the Germans do not appear so vivacious, nor the Turks so energetic, as to afford triumphant demonstrations in behalf of the sacred 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.