Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/698

680 drink often to give themselves heart, murderers especially; while there is not a case known, as M. Aurelian Schole has observed, of a crime committed with pipe or cigar in the mouth. The author himself confesses that he dulled his conscience with tobacco for a long time. It had not, it is true, many reproaches to address to him. Sometimes it reproved him for idleness, or admonished him for a neglect, or a want of punctuality, or an excess of passion in which he had not measured his tone. To quench his remorse he lighted a cigar, and all was forgotten. If tobacco had never committed worse misdeeds, nobody, I believe, would have thought of quarreling with it.

Other modes of voluntary intoxication have the common characteristic of deranging the reason and the moral sense. Hashish produces hallucinations and delirium, and plunges persons into a condition like madness. Opium puts to sleep, and procures for some persons agreeable dreams; but one becomes quickly habituated to it, the doses have to be increased, all the functions flag, and the opium-smoker falls into a condition of inanity, at times interrupted by fits of homicidal furor. Morphinomaniacs do not suffer the same perversion of mind, but they become false, dissimulating, indifferent to all that is foreign to their passion, extending to family feeling and even to honor. Their health is injured more quickly than by opium-smoking, and their life is shortened as much. Alcoholism is still worse. I have studied its effects in all their phases in another work, and will not repeat my conclusions now. It is sufficient to recollect that the ignoble and degrading vice attacks nations in all their vital forces; families in their honor, fortune, and prosperity; that it peoples hospitals, insane asylums, and prisons; and costs France a milliard and a half of francs a year.

Tobacco can be reproached with no such mischief. It has never led the reason astray, destroyed the will, or perverted the sensibility of any one. The most hardened smoker enjoys at all times the most perfect clearness of mind. Even at the moment when he is under the influence of nicotine he talks, reasons, studies, and works with a freedom of thought that proves that his intelligence has not received any harm. One might say that tobacco had disengaged him from physical impressions, and that, as Dr. Richet says, it mollifies the sensibility of the organs only to leave the psychical functions greater freedom of evolution.

There is another characteristic difference between tobacco and other voluntary poisons. A person can break up the habit of using tobacco, while alcoholism and morphinomania are almost incurable. At the end of my long career I can not recollect having witnessed more than two or three cures from alcoholism, and I can not affirm that they would have been permanent if the