ave
measured themselves against the tobacco-plant and been defeated. Charles
I. attempted to banish it, and in return the soldiers of Cromwell puffed
their smoke contemptuously in his face, as he sat a prisoner in the
guard-chamber. Cromwell himself undertook it, and Evelyn says that the
troopers smoked in triumph at his funeral. Wellington tried it, and
the artists caricatured him on a pipe's head with a soldier behind him
defying with a whiff that imperial nose. Louis Napoleon is said to
be now attempting it, and probably finds his subjects more ready to
surrender the freedom of the press than of the pipe.

The more recent efforts against tobacco, like most arguments in which
morals and physiology are mingled, have lost much of their effect
through exaggeration. On both sides there has been enlisted much loose
statement, with some bad logic. It is, for instance, unreasonable to
hold up the tobacco-plant to general indignation because Linnaeus
classed it with the natural order _Luridae_,--since he attributed the
luridness only to the color of those plants, not to their character. It
is absurd to denounce it as belonging to the poisonous nightshade tribe,
when the potato and the tomato also appertain to that perilous domestic
circle. It is hardly fair even to complain of it for yielding a
poisonous oil, when these two virtuous plants--to say nothing of the
peach and the almond--will under sufficient chemical provocation do the
same thing. Two drops of nicotine will, indeed, kill a rabbit; but so,
it is said, will two drops of solanine. Great are the resources of
chemistry, and a well-regulated scientific mind can detect something
deadly almost anywhere.

Nor is it safe to assume, as many do, that tobacco predisposes very
powerfully to more dangerous dissipations. The non-smoking Saxons were
probably far more intemperate in drinking than the modern English; and
Lane, the best authority, points out that wine is now far less used by
the Orientals than at the time of the "Arabian Nights," when tobacco
had not been introduced. And in respect to yet more perilous sensual
excesses, tobacco is now admitted, both by friends and foes, to be quite
as much a sedative as a stimulant.

The point of objection on the ground of inordinate expense is doubtless
better taken, and can be met only by substantial proof that the enormous
outlay is a wise one. Tobacco may be "the anodyne of poverty," as
somebody has said, but it certainly pr