A man never can attain his majority and use tobacco.  He never can realize his full capabilities or his possibilities.  He can always attain to a better standard without nicotine.

There is one objection that, from a business standpoint, every business man ought to make to tobacco.  When he employs a man that uses tobacco he gets only a certain per cent. of his employee’s time and of his brain, because the employee must serve his tobacco master part of his time and when he is not smoking his mind is preoccupied because he is thinking of smoking.  Consequently, he cannot concentrate his mind upon his business.

I have heard poor, silly, empty-headed women say that it is manly to smoke.  If it is manly to smoke, why isn’t it womanly to smoke?  The tobacco habit is the reverse of manhood and destroys manhood, for manhood means strength of character, not the gratification of lust.

If tobacco is good for men, it is also good for women.  I do not suppose that one could find a man so low and degraded as to walk down the street with a woman who had a cigarette or cigar in her mouth.  Women should make the same standard for men that men do for women.  Many women would smoke in public if men did not denounce it.  Men would quit smoking in public if women denounced it as much.

I have heard some women say, “I like the smell of a good cigar.”  I never smelled a good one.  It is not made.  They are like snakes; they are all bad.  I never knew of but one good use that tobacco was put to, and that was to kill lice on cows.  My father used it for that purpose on his farm.  It does kill that kind of germs.

The evil has become so common that whenever you go abroad you are compelled to breathe the contents of somebody else’s month.  It would be rude of me to take a piece of fruit out of my mouth and throw it into somebody else’s mouth, but anyone may throw his poisonous breath and smoke into my mouth and I have no defense.  Spitting is forbidden in the cars.  Smoking is a great deal worse, but the reason why it is not denounced is that people can get a revenue from men’s smoking, while they have to clean up after spitters, and there is no money in that.

I can prevent a man spitting into my mouth, but I cannot avoid his smoke.  A man seems to think that he is free to project his stinking breath in my face on the street, in hotels, in sleeping cars, coaches—­indeed, in every public place.  Now I would as soon smell a skunk.  There is some excuse for a skunk; he can’t help being one.  But men have become so rank in their persons from this poisonous odor that they almost knock me down as they pass me.  And when I say, “Man, don’t throw that awful stench in my face,” he answers, “You get away.”  I reply, “If I smelled as badly as you do, I would be the one to get away.”