Tobacco and Ethics.

Press, Volume LXIV, Issue 19199, 4 January 1928, Page 6

Tobacco and Ethics.

The M.E.C.W.H.M.S. (Methodist Episcopal Church , Women's Home Missionary Society) of America has, according to a cable printed yesterday morning, cancelled engagements with a gifted English preacher because she. smokes. Miss Royden in reply says that she does not earc a button whether she smokes in America or not, but that she refuses to concede that smoking is " a matter of religious importance." Most sensible people •will agree with her, but it must bo granted that there is at least some precedent for the action of the M.E.C.W.H.M.S. in invoking the aid of religion in their campaign against tobacco. There is indeed a Royal precedent. One of our own ' monarchs—the scholarly James I.—wrote a lengthy treatise against tobacco in which he asserted that " smoking is a custom loathsome to the "eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to "the brain, dangerous to the luugs. "Like Hell in the very substance of "it, a stinking, loathsome thing, and "so is Hell." This, probably, is just how the M.E.C.AY.H.M.S. feel about it, though they may lack James I.'s gift of picturesque utterance. ' As far as the effects of tobacco on the human body are concerned James 1., if he were living to-day, would be able to obtain the support of some of the representatives of modern medicine — most people have heard of the sad case of Mynheer van Klaes, who died of excessive smoking at 9S—but the connexion with Hell is less securely established. It can even be pointed out that tobacco is often a distinct aid to certain Christian virtues. Dr. Stevenson's advice to women to select as husbands men who s:.ioke was merely an admission that smokers are of that equable temperament so essential to successful matrimony. Of the beneficial influence of tobacco in a wider sphere Thomas Carlyle has written this:

Tobacco smoke is the one element in which, by our European manners, men can sit silent together without embar-

rassmentj and where no man is bound to speak one word more than ho Jias actually and veritably got to say. Nay, rather, every man is admonished and enjoined by the taws of honour, and even of personal ease, to stop short of that point The results of which salutary practice, if introduced into constitutional Parliament, might evidently be incalculable.

An American expressed the same thought when he said, " What this " country needs is a good five-cent "cigar." It would certainly be interesting to try the effects of one on a reformer who had got no further •with the weed than Miss Royden.