That it is a poison no man of common sense will deny.  A case was reported where a little child lay upon its mother’s lap and one drop fell from a pipe to the child’s lip, and it went into convulsions and into death.  But you say, “Haven’t people lived on in complete use of it to old age?” Oh, yes; just as I have seen inebriates seventy years old.  In Boston, years ago, there was a meeting in which there were several centenarians, and they were giving their experience, and one centenarian said that he had lived over a hundred years, and that he ascribed it to the fact that he had refrained from the use of intoxicating liquors.  Right after him another centenarian said he had lived over a hundred years, and he ascribed it to the fact that for the last fifty years he had hardly seen a sober moment.  It is an amazing thing how many outrages men may commit upon their physical system and yet live on.  In the case of the man of the jug he lived on because his body was pickled.  In the case of the man of the pipe, he lived on because his body turned into smoked liver!

But are there no truths to be uttered in regard to this great evil?  What is the advice to be given to the multitude of young people who hear me this day?  What is the advice you are going to give to your children?

First of all, we must advise them to abstain from the use of tobacco because all the medical fraternity of the United States and Great Britain agree in ascribing to this habit terrific unhealth.  The men whose life-time work is the study of the science of health say so, and shall I set up my opinion against theirs?  Dr. Agnew, Dr. Olcott, Dr. Barnes, Dr. Rush, Dr. Mott, Dr. Harvey, Dr. Hosack—­all the doctors, allopathic, homeopathic, hydropathic, eclectic, denounce the habit as a matter of unhealth.  A distinguished physician declared he considered the use of tobacco caused seventy different styles of disease, and he says:  “Of all the cases of cancer in the mouth that have come under my observation, almost in every case it has been ascribed to tobacco.”

The united testimony of all physicians is that it depresses the nervous system, that it takes away twenty-five per cent. of the physical vigor of this generation, and that it goes on as the years multiply and, damaging this generation with accumulated curse, it strikes other centuries.  And if it is so deleterious to the body, how much more destructive to the mind.  An eminent physician, who was the superintendent of the insane asylum at Northampton, Massachusetts, says:  “Fully one half the patients we get in our asylum have lost their intellect through the use of tobacco.”  If it is such a bad thing to injure the body, what a bad thing, what a worse thing it is to injure the mind, and any man of common sense knows that tobacco attacks the nervous system, and everybody knows that the nervous system attacks the mind.