Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/344

328 mania. We may assume that smoking, on the average, costs as much as drinking, and while the one gulps the sustenance of a family down his throat, the other puffs it into the air as smoke. And if the family could but in the least participate in this socalled enjoyment! But there is no more egotistical ‘entertainment' than smoking; it not only excludes every second person from sharing in it, it actually Grives everyone who is not hardened to it to seek safety in flight. A drinker can at least offer his glass to his wife, but no smoker would lend his nasty weed to his wife, even if she were so unrefined as to share his loathsome taste."

Another article signed "J. Oelkopf," upbraids the tobacco barbarians still more emphatically.

"However ridiculous it may seem," says Mr. Oelkopf, "I shall advance a new theory of development that, for me, contains a profound truth, superficial and paradoxical as it may appear. My theory is: So long as men smoke tobacco they are not free and cannot become free.

"I have just attended a meeting of German radicals. I feel as if I were in a paroxysm of sea-sickness. My smarting eyes water. I cannot breathe; whenever I move I am threatened with an attack of vomiting, my clothes are saturated to my very skin. with the odor of the disgusting weed, the use of which we have learned from the joyless, bestial savages, and all my female friends flee from me as from a monster. And why is all this? Because, in