The Passing of the Home

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The Tobacco Curse From many towns and cities the Era has received letters commending the effort in our last issue to warn the young men of the evils of cigarette smoking.

Many teachers strongly declare against the evil habit. More and more it is becoming the fashion in large mercantile houses, railroad offices, and other business establishments to discard the cigarette smoker. The yellow forefinger and thumb which he carries about with him are insignia for dismissal, or for refusal wherever he presents himself for work. Not only is the habit death- dealing to the boy physically, but it destroys his ambition for work, and his moral stamina.

Dr. George H. Brimhall, who has charge of from seven hundred to one thousand boys in the Brigham Young University, speaking upon the subject, said :

"I don't know of anything else, unless it is unchastity, that seems to so wither and shrink up the manhood of a boy as the smoking of cigarettes. Long experience has shown that the word of honor of a cigarette smoker is never at par."

Here, then, we have the strong word of a leading educator I in our own state for the truth of the statement that physical dej terioration and moral degeneracy follow the dirty habit. Dr. L. J Bremer, of St. Vincent's Institution for the Insane at St. Louis, !

Mo., wrote, a few years ago i

"There is an alarming increase of juvenile smokers, and, basing my assertion on the experience gained in private practice and at St. Vincent's Institution, I will state that he boy who smokes at seven will drink whiskey at fourteen, take morphine at twenty five, and wind up with cocaine and the rest of the narcotics at thirty and later on." •'I might as well go to a lunatic asylum for employees, as to hire cigarette smokers," said E. H. Harriman, once the great head of the Union Pacific railway system. "I am not much of a mathematician," said the cigarette, "but I can add to man's nervous troubles, I can subtract from his physical energy, I can multiply his aches and pains, I can divide his mental powers, I take interest from his work, and discount his chances of — success." David Starr Jordan.