Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/458

444 It was first brought to this city by Creole and colored female emigrants from New Orleans. They communicated the infection to their sister outcasts, and the disease—for it can be called by no other name—grew by slow degrees at first, but surely, and has been growing now some twenty-five or thirty years, till it is rapidly assuming dimensions which some means should be devised for checking. So long as it was confined to the class who first adopted it little harm was done. One vice more or less is but an incident in the record of their wretched lives. But the terrible evil is making its way insidiously into more respectable circles of society.

It may be said that this is only a liberal "quid" pro quo for all the offensive indignity which chewing tobacco by man has heaped upon the olfactory sensibilities of woman; but it may be left to healthy-minded women themselves to decide if there is any parallel.

Yet, as before stated, the evil is steadily and perceptibly expanding. There is not a tobacconist in town who does not keep a special kind of snuff for the express accommodation of women. It is a partial secret of the trade, only familiar to the initiated; but the traffic will soon be conducted openly, unless woman herself can be induced to relinquish or refrain from the pernicious habit which sustains it.

Of the chewing of tobacco by women, in either "plug" or "fine cut" form, it is scarcely necessary to speak. It is done to some extent among the agricultural peasantry of South Germany, among the Indians, and the poor whites and negroes of the South. This manner of enjoying the weed does not prevail with women in New York. It would, perhaps, be difficult to find a hundred cases in the whole city.

When Sir Walter Raleigh—most fastidious and gallant of men—brought the fragrant weed to the acquaintance of civilized man, and, consequently, of woman, he little thought to what vile purposes it might be put.

Had he imagined the merest fraction of the disastrous results of his discovery, he never would have accomplished his twelve years of compulsory board and lodging in the Tower of London. In less than twelve hours, aqua tophana, or some other suicidal agent of the period, would have been taken in a large enough dose to effectually expiate the prospective evils arising from his misguided spirit of enterprise, and, so far as one life could be regarded as an adequate sacrifice, have atoned for the fearful mischief whereof he was destined to be the author.