Blessed Are They Which Are Persecuted for Righteousness’ Sake

"On the Run" The Tobacco Record, one of the leading tobacco papers in the United States, published in Brooklyn, New York, has the following editorial under date of May 11, 1921, which shows the attitude of the Tobacco People on the nation-wide fight that is being made against the use of tobacco. The Era quotes it in full. Notice how they worry over the "solace of tobacco:"

"Don't Laugh When They Tell us They are Going to Make Everybody Stop Smoking!" Think of What the Prohibitionists Did

Several hundred earnest men and women assembled in New York recently to voice their protest against the enactment of blue laws. Governor Edward I. Edwards of New Jersey was one of the principal speakers, and he sounded a key note when he said: "Don't laugh when they tell us they are going to make everybody stop smoking. That's just what we did when they talked about prohibition." It would be well if these words of Governor Edwards could be forcibly impressed upon the mind of every friend of tobacco, for while there can be no question but that the friends of tobacco in the United States vastly outnumber its enemies, it is a fact that too many of these friends have been inclined to treat the efforts of the anti-tobacconists as a joke. To the great majority of the friends of the weed it has seemed inconceivable that a relatively small minority could ever bring about the enactment of laws that would deprive the majority of the solace of tobacco, and therefore they have been inclined to regard the anti-tobacconists as objects of mirth rather than as a menace to the personal liberty of the American people. Yet, the Tobacco Record submits that it is no more inconceivable today that the United States may come to be dominated by the anti-tobacconists within the next ten years, than it was ten years ago that the idea of nation-wide, bone-dry Prohibition would have become a part of the fundamental law of the land by 1920. Comparatively few of the friends of the weed seem to have the slightest conception of the fact that the anti-tobacconists are working more zealously and more assiduously at the present time than the Prohibitionists worked any time in the past. The recent announcement in the daily newspapers that four express car loads of anti-tobacco literature attached to a fast mail train has passed through Omaha on a given date on its way from New York to California, and that this shipment was part of a 50 carload lot of anti-tobacco literature that had been prepared and printed in New York for distribution in all parts of the country, demonstrated that the anti-tobacconists were not lacking in powerful financial resources. But the preparation, printing and distribution of hundreds of tons of anti-tobacco literature, is only an incident in the nationwide campaign for