hy not for the
actual one? If he needs steady nerves and a cool head for the play of
life,--and even prize-fighting is called "sporting,"--why not for its
earnest? Here we are all croaking that we are not in the health in which
our twentieth birthday found us, and yet we will not condescend to the
wise abstinence which even twenty practises. Moderate training is simply
a rational and healthful life.

So palpable is this, that there is strong reason to believe that the
increased attention to physical training is operating against tobacco.
If we may trust literature, as has been shown, its use is not now so
great as formerly, in spite of the vague guesses of alarmists. "It is
estimated," says Mr. Coles, "that the consumption of tobacco in this
country is eight times as great as in France and three times as great as
in England, in proportion to the population"; but there is nothing
in the world more uncertain than "It is estimated." It is frequently
estimated, for instance, that nine out of ten of our college students
use tobacco; and yet by the statistics of the last graduating class
at Cambridge it appears that it is used by only thirty-one out of
seventy-six. I am satisfied that the extent of the practice is often
exaggerated. In a gymnastic club of young men, for instance, where I
have had opportunity to take the statistics, it is found that less
than one-quarter use it, though there has never been any agitation or
discussion of the matter. These things indicate that it can no longer
be claimed, as Moliere asserted two centuries ago, that he who lives
without tobacco is not worthy to live.

And as there has been some exaggeration in describing the extent to
which Tobacco is King, so there has doubtless been some overstatement
as to the cruelty of his despotism. Enough, however, remains to condemn
him. The present writer, at least, has the firmest conviction, from
personal observation and experience, that the imagined benefits of
tobacco-using (which have never, perhaps, been better stated than in an
essay which appeared in this magazine, in August, 1860) are ordinarily
an illusion, and its evils a far more solid reality,--that it stimulates
only to enervate, soothes only to depress,--that it neither permanently
calms the nerves nor softens the temper nor enlightens the brain, but
that in the end its tendencies are precisely the opposites of
these, beside the undoubted incidental objections of costliness and
uncleanne