Baltimore Evening Sun (1 March 1913): 6.

The moralists of Baltimore display a strange and sinister disinclination to join the anti- cigarette crusade. Since I launched it 10 days ago not a single one of them has come forward with a promise of support. I have heard nothing from the Hon. Samuel E. Pentz, nothing from the Rev. Dr. W. W. Davis, nothing from the Hon. William H. Anderson, nothing from Dr. Donald R. Hooker. These men must know, if they are the moral specialists they pretend to be, that the cigarette is the mother and father of all sin, that it is the ultimate and first cause of drunkenness, Sabbath-breaking and worse things. They must be familiar with the literature of the subject. They must have the proofs, as I have. And yet they maintain a discreet and portentious silence, refusing churlishly all aid to the cause.

Meanwhile, I get help from the Rev. Dr. Wilbur F. Crafts, of Washington, superintendent and treasurer of the International Reform Bureau, Inc., an organization devoted to general practice in the field of moral endeavor. Dr. Crafts is the head and forefront of the Vice Crusade in Washington, and is the chief supporter of the Kenyon Red-Light bill. In addition, he is a valiant enemy to rum and fought a noble fight for the Webb bill. Going further, he is incessantly at the heels of opium, cocaine, Sabbath-breaking, the army canteen, race-track gambling, the exhibition of prize-fight pictures, divorce, obscene literature, Sunday mails and the white slave trade. But despite all this pious activity, unmatched by any single moralist in Baltimore, or by any dozen of them, he still has the time and energy to combat the loathsome and licentious cigarette.

And why? Simply because Dr. Crafts is well aware, as every genuine virtuoso of virtue must be, that the abolition of the cigarette would strike vice at its heart and core, that once it were halted in its hellish work, drunkenness and white slavery would cease forthwith. The cigarette, indeed, is the pathfinder and chaperon of all other human curses. Look into the history of any criminal in the Maryland Penitentiary today, and you will find that his first sinful act was to smoke a cigarette. Go into the red light district, and you will be choked and gagged by the deadly coffin nail’s gehennic fumes. Enter any kaif in Baltimore and you will see a herd of its victims draped along the rail, sallow, hollow-eyed, obscene. Says Judge Samuel L. Black. of Columbus, Ohio, quoted by Dr. Crafts:

My experience is that of juvenile court judges all over the country, who agree that the cigarette is the most destructive habit, except, perhaps, actual vice, to which it leads.

Says Dr. R. Martin, in the Lancet, the leading British medical journal:

The fumes of burning tobacco dry and irritate the throat, exciting thirst. Hence, drinking and smoking are generally associated.

Says the Hon. James W. Jefferson, warden of the State prison at Keokuk, Kan.:

I have never known a thief who didn’t smoke cigarettes. When you take them away from a prisoner you have made the first and longest step toward his reformation.

Says Mrs. Amanda J. Botts, field secretary of the Iowa Vigilance League:

Of the 780 girls rescued from Iowa opium dens during the year 1912, more than 700 ascribed their downfall to the cigarette. In most cases they were induced to try the awful coffin nail by other smokers, to whom all moral sense had been numbed by the poisonous alkaloids.

Says the Rev. Dr. Leander Bentz, chairman of the Chautauqua (N. Y.) Vice Commission:

Find me a white slave, and I will show you a cigarette smoker. The first cigarette leads inevitably to the first drink--and after that the deluge. In my work among the erring here in Chautauqua I have not found a single victim who was not also a cigarette smoker, and who did not confess to smoking cigarettes before going astray.

Says Mrs. Zullah Foster Stevens, in the Sunday-School Times of November 1, 1902:

The cigarette habit is a recent form of intemperance that is proving itself so destructive to * * * moral character that our educators, our business men and our public officials are declaring that their doors must be closed against cigarette smokers.

Says Prof. Dr. Adolph Hungerberger, of the University of Jena:

The effect of cigarette smoke upon the lymphatic system is to curdle the colloids and dehydrate the permanganates. The result is the process known to pathology as dephlogistication. That is to say, the normal pulsations of the ductless glands sink to a mere pizzicato murmur and the valves of the liver are clogged by silicates. Once in this state, the patient is ripe for angina pectoris.

Even more impressive is the evidence of Dr. W. Knortz, professor of morbid anatomy at Strassburg:

Cigarette smoke, passed through fuming sulphuric arid for purification, is fatal to the B. anthracis in six minutes, to the vibrio Metchnikovi in eight and to the P. capitis in eleven. Injected into the blood-stream, it causes precipitation of the chromates and anilines within half an hour and death within an hour.

Dr. Knortz, with characteristic scientific courage, conducted elaborate experiments upon himself. In one day, for example, he smoked 178 cigarettes--a very moderate allowance for the average gambler or kidnapper. The result was that his pulse went up to 164, his blood pressure increased to seven pounds to the square inch, and one of his lungs collapsed entirely, so that he had to be revived with the pulmotor. In addition, he set fire to the Strassiburg Technische Hochschule and it burned to the ground.

But I pile up no more evidence. What is self-evident needs no proof. The cigarette is the fountainhead of vice, the forerunner alike of winebibbing and Sunday baseball, of gambling and seduction. And yet not a single baltimoralist raises his voice against it. It corrupts and corrodes our statesmen--and the Hon. Charles J. Bonaparte is silent. It makes recruits for the white slave trade--and Dr. O. Edward Janney smites it not. It leads to dancing and theatre-going--and Dr. John F. Goucher fails to bawl it out. It lures the enraptured votary on to morphine, to cocaine, to hasheesh, to caffiene--and the Hon. Eugene Levering lets it get away.

A last call for these our village Hamurabis, our amateur Justinians, our volunteer Pythagorases and Hannah Mores, to join the holy war. Let them come aboard at once, or forever hide their milk-white banners. The band-wagon is starting; the ship weighs anchor; the airship flaps its wings. Metaphors grow mixed--but the accursed cigarette must go!

Score one for the Factory Site Commission! It has just induced another factory to move from South Baltimore to East Baltimore.--Adv.