as the
superintendent of the insane asylum at Northampton, Massachusetts,
says: "Fully one half the patients we get in our asylum have lost
their intellect through the use of tobacco." If it is such a bad thing
to injure the body, what a bad thing, what a worse thing it is to
injure the mind, and any man of common sense knows that tobacco
attacks the nervous system, and everybody knows that the nervous
system attacks the mind.

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