Smoking

Manawatu Times, Volume 64, Issue 55, 7 March 1939, Page 12

Smoking

“HORRIBLE JEWISH HABIT” I thought I knew all the arguments against smoking, but Herr Julius ! Strciehcr has discovered one that, at least to me, is new (writes Robert Lynd in the News Chronicle). He has discovered that the spread of the smoking habit is the result of a subtle Jewish plot which was aimed at the slow poisoning of the great Aryan race. “Jews taught the Germans to smoke,” he declared, “in order to destroy the German nation and to make money.* * It would be easier to believe that this was true if so many Jews did not themselves smoke. I cannot believe that my Jewish friends, when they smoke, are deliberately trying to commit suicide. With their pipes and cigars and cigarettes in their mouths they even look as if they were enjoying themselves. I cordially agree with Herr Streiclier’s dislike of smoking, however, and I should bo inclined for tho thirty-first time to give it up, if Herr Streicher had not gone on to suggest that, if one abstained from tobacco, one might become one of men who do big things, like Hitler and Mussolini. I confess, when I read this, my resolution wavered, lor if there is one thing that I want to bo saved from, it is doing big things like Hitler and Mussolini. If smoking alone can preserve me from doing big things such as are being done in Europe to-day, then I feci I must for the sake of others go on smoking, whatever tho cost to my health.

In the present state of things it would not be fair to Europe for me to give up smoking. I know from my own experience how dangerous even a month’s abstention from tobacco can be. The last time I gave up smoking I found myself before long the prey of a new and terrifying energy. The form it took was writing verse. I who had scarcely written a line of verse for 30 years now could not stop writing it. Sometimes I wrote as many as three poems a day. Worse still, I was attacked by megalomania, and became the victim of a delusion; I sent some of it to a friend a mine who edited a weekly paper, and was amazed when he returned it with the cold remark: “I refuse to publish the fruits of your abstinence,” and an earnest entreaty to me to take up smoking again with all possible speed.

Had it not been for that friendly (if cruel) counsel, I might by now have been a hardened non-smoker and have inflicted on the world the worst epic poem in the English language. Yes, smoking may make us cough, but if it saves us from being epic poets and dictators it is better that we should go on coughing. I have examined all the arguments against smoking, and I must say most of them sound pretty unconvincing. Some people say that you will save money if you give up smoking; but all those of my friends who have given up smoking strenuously deny that they have saved a penny by it. My own feeling is that cither you are born to save money or you are not; and that a thriftless non-smoker is more likely to have an overdraft at the bank than a thriftv smoker.

Another argument against the use of tobacco is that it is a mark of weakness —a symptom of anxiety, neurosis as a psychologist has put it—and that we ought to give up tobacco in order to strengthen our character.

If tobacco is really a medicine against anxiety, however, it seems to me it should be commended like any other beneficent medicine.

Strongly though I disapprove of tobacco, if it can lull my anxiety in this very anxious world I will go on using it. The only resaons I have heard for giving up smoking are purely selfish ones—that it will lengthen one’s life or cure one’s catarrh or give one a better palate for good wine. I remember once pressing a friend to give up smoking for these and other reasons, and how lie answered me with a sad and saintly headshakc: “I should like to do what you advise, but I have to think of my wife and children.” “How can it affect them?” I asked. “Well,” he said, “when I give up smoking I cease to be a normal goodnatured human being, and become like a bear with a sore head, a lion with a thorn in its foot, a dog that has been stung by a wasp, and my wife and children live under a reign of terror. The last time I was selfish enough to give up smoking my wife besought me for tho sake of the children to take to my pipe again. I disapprove of smoking as much as you do, but so far as I am concerned that touch about the kids settled the matter.”

When you come to think of it, the unselfishness of the smoker presents a curious contrast to the selfishness of the non-smoker. The non-smoker goes about tho world interfering with other people who do not share his tastes and complaining of people who smoke in trains and theatres.

The smoker, on the other baud, never interferes with anybody or dreams of complaining because non-smokers don’t sinoke in trains and theatres. 1 can sit beside a non-smoker without exhibiting any signs of disgust or discomfort. But I have met non-smokers who exhibited signs of extreme disgust and discomfort when I lit a cigarette in their company.

One of the strongest proofs of the selfishness of the non-smoker is the fact that he is a confirmed tax-dodger. Living in an age in which millions of pounds are needed for education, social reform, and national defence, he refuses even to contribute the mite that