Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/345

Rh to my principles, I felt obliged to attend a meeting of men, who call themselves free, and radical, but who are neither free enough in themselves to refrain for an hour from the fuming, stinking weed, nor liberal enough towards others to save them from the necessity of undergoing this unbearable, nauseating torture in the interests of liberty. To see those fellows sit there, as if under orders, tossing the tobacco stick about between their lips, with the most important air in the world, raising their enraptured eyes to heaven, to puff out the stinking fumes, as a whale throws up water, and filling the room with smoke so thick that one is tempted to grasp it and form it into balls to throw at the sinokers, and knock the sticks out of their distorted mouths! O, how often have I had the desire to seal people's mouths with court-plaster when they were talking nonsense! But the desire is still stronger when they use their mouths as a crater for their suffocating, eye-destroying pestilent fumes.

"The tobacco-smokers are themselves slaves and tyrants to others. Is not he a slave who cannot live, not even discuss liberty, without an indulgence, which is not a necessity of nature, and has become bearable only through habit? And is not he a tyrant, who, in his indulgence, has not the least regard for others, to whom it is utterly intolerable, but who, from social considerations and circumstances, are obliged to be in his company? If the mere circumstance of a man's enjoying, or being addicted to a