Besides that, all reformers will tell you that the use of tobacco creates an unnatural thirst, and it is the cause of drunkenness in America to-day more than anything else.  In all cases where you find men taking strong drink you find they use tobacco.  There are men who use tobacco who do not take strong drink, but all who use strong drink use tobacco, and that shows beyond controversy there is an affinity between the two products.  There are reformers here to-day who will testify to you it is impossible for a man to reform from taking strong drink until he quits tobacco.  In many of the cases where men have been reformed from strong drink and have gone back to their cups, they have testified that they first touched tobacco and then they surrendered to intoxicants.

I say in the presence of this assemblage to-day, in which there are many physicians—­and they know that what I say is true on the subject—­that the pathway to the drunkard’s grave and the drunkard’s hell is strewn thick with tobacco-leaves.  What has been the testimony on this subject?  Is this a mere statement of a preacher whose business it is to talk morals, or is the testimony of the world just as emphatic?  What did Benjamin Franklin say?  “I never saw a well man in the exercise of common sense who would say that tobacco did him any good.”  What did Thomas Jefferson say?  Certainly he is good authority.  He says in regard to the culture of tobacco, “It is a culture productive of infinite wretchdness.”  What did Horace Greeley say of it?  “It is a profane stench.”  What did Daniel Webster say of it?  “If those men must smoke, let them take the horse-shed!” One reason why the habit goes on from destruction to destruction is that so many ministers of the gospel take it.  They smoke themselves into bronchitis, and then the dear people have to send them to Europe to get them restored from exhausting religious services!  They smoke until the nervous system is shattered.  They smoke themselves to death.  I could mention the names of five distinguished clergymen who died of cancer of the mouth, and the doctor said, in every case, it was the result of tobacco.  The tombstone of many a minister of religion has been covered all over with handsome eulogy, when, if the true epitaph had been written, it would have said:  “Here lies a man killed by too much cavendish!” They smoke until the world is blue, and their theology is blue, and everything is blue.  How can a man stand in the pulpit and preach on the subject of temperance when he is indulging such a habit as that?  I have seen a cuspadore in a pulpit into which the holy man dropped his cud before he got up to read about “blessed are the pure in heart,” and to read about the rolling of sin as a sweet morsel under the tongue, and to read about the unclean animals in Leviticus that chewed the cud.