Juvenile Smoking

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 47, 19 November 1903, Page 18

Juvenile Smoking

There is clearly a spring of eternal hope bubbling in the breasts of some of our legislators that is strong enough to turn a flax mill. Its mechanical energy developed the Juvenile Smoking Suppression Bill, the third reading of which was agreed to on last Friday by a large majority. It affects persons under sixteen and runs on the lines of acts that are in force in parts of. panada and the United States. But tfcje law makers' hopes of divorcing the small boy from the ' divine weed' are likely to suffer bitter disappointment. The privation of the customary calumet is one of the weightiest penalties in tjhe penal code of the Dutch schioofls. George A. Sala, in one of his books, tells how one of his teachers — * an eccentric instructor, half Pestalozzi, half Philosopher Square '—once carried out a successful crusade agjainst surreptitious weeds in his school. *He made it publicly known,' says Sala, « that a boy detected in smoking would not necessarily be caned, but that on three alternate days for a week following the discovery of his offence, he would be supplied at 1 p.m. with a clean tobacco-pipe ajnd half an ounce of prime shag, in lieu of dinner. We had very few unlicensed smokers after this announcement,' says George Augustus. We recommend the Pestalozzi-Square method of Smoke Suppression to the consideration of legislators, fathers of boys, and all others whom it may concern.