Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/347

Rh hours of torture without a minute's respite from the barbaric fuming, puffing, spitting and nauseating stench. Is it thus that liberty is to be understood and practiced? If indecency and vulgarity towards others is liberty, what then, pray, is tyranny? Our ‘free' men talk so much of ‘culture.' Is there no incongruity between tobacco smoking and culture?

"By right of habit tobacco smoking has come to be a legitimate means of

 "Slavery among the free. "Tyranny among liberators, "And vulgarity among the cultured.

"How can any one who is not able to free even himself from so unnatural, so disgusting and so injurious a need, be expected to have the necessary insight and strength to remain faithful in other things, to reason, liberty and the beautiful.

"Therefore, I repeat, so long as men smoke tobacco they are not free and can not become free."

Now let me read you one more communication from a woman who has something to say about the effect of this Oelkopf article, an effect which we would rejoice to observe on all men, who still have enough reason and strength left to renounce a vice which has nothing to justify it.

"Mr. Oelkopf has laid the colors on thick, in order to demonstrate the nastiness and injuriousness of tobacco-smoking; but whoever loves truth cannot gainsay him, and I agree with his assertion: ‘So long as men smoke they are not free and cannot