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Beautiful Words from the Master Wordsmith... Mr. Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)

Nicotine Nannies

I don't want any of your statistics; I took your whole batch and lit my
pipe with it.

I hate your kind of people. You are always ciphering out how much a man's
health is injured, and how much his intellect is impaired, and how many
pitiful dollars and cents he wastes in the course of ninety-two years'
indulgence in the fatal practice of smoking; and in the equally fatal
practice of drinking coffee; and in playing billiards occasionally; and in
taking a glass of wine at dinner, etc. etc. And you are always figuring out
how many women have been burned to death because of the dangerous fashion
of wearing expansive hoops, etc. etc. You never see more than one side of
the question.

You are blind to the fact that most old men in America smoke and drink
coffee, although, according to your theory, they ought to have died young;
and that hearty old Englishmen drink wine and survive it, and portly old
Dutchmen both drink and smoke freely, and yet grow older and fatter all the
time. And you never try to find out how much solid comfort, relaxation, and
enjoyment a man derives from smoking in the course of a lifetime (which is
worth ten times the money he would save by letting it alone), nor the
appalling aggregate of happiness lost in a lifetime by your kind of people
from not smoking. Of course you can save money by denying yourself all
those little vicious enjoyments for fifty years; but then what can you do
with it? What use can you put it to? Money can't save your infinitesimal
soul. All the use that money can be put to is to purchase comfort and
enjoyment in this life; therefore, as you are an enemy to comfort and
enjoyment where is the use of accumulating cash?

It won't do for you to say that you can use it to better purpose in
furnishing a good table, and in charities, and in supporting tract
societies, because you know yourself that you people who have no petty
vices are never known to give away a cent, and that you stint yourselves so
in the matter of food that you are always feeble and hungry. And you never
dare to laugh in the daytime for fear some poor wretch, seeing you in a
good humor, will try to borrow a dollar of you; and in church you are
always down on your knees, with your ears buried in the cushion, when the
contribution-box comes around; and you never give the revenue officers a
full statement of your income.

Now you know all these things yourself, don't you? Very well, then, what is
the use of your stringing out your miserable lives to a lean and withered
old age? What is the use of your saving money that is so utterly worthless
to you? In a word, why don't you go off somewhere and die, and not be
always trying to seduce people into becoming as ornery and unlovable as you
are yourselves, by your villainous "moral statistics"?

Now, I don't approve of dissipation, and I don't indulge in it either; but
I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty
vices. And so I don't want to hear from you any more. I think you are the
very same man who read me a long lecture last week about the degrading vice
of smoking cigars, and then came back, in my absence, with your
reprehensible fire-proof gloves on, and carried off my beautiful parlor
stove.

There isn't a helluva lot I can add to this. It is pure truth. I think I will e-mail a copy of this post to my baby brother. He needs to wisen up some.

PipeTobacco