SMOKING AND DRINKING.
BY
JAMES PARTON.
BOSTON:
TICKNOR AND FIELDS.
1868.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by
TICKNOR AND FIELDS,
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of theDistrict of Massachusetts.
University Press: Welch, Bigelow, & Co.,
Cambridge.
PREFACE.
The next very important thing that man has to attend to is his health.
In some other respects, progress has been made during the last hundredyears, and several considerable obstacles to the acquisition of astable happiness have been removed or diminished.
In the best parts of the best countries, so much knowledge is nowfreely offered to all the young as suffices to place within their reachall existing knowledge. We may say with confidence that the time is notdistant when, in the United States, no child will live farther thanfour miles from a school-house, kept open four months in the year, andwhen there will be the beginning of a self-sustaining public library inevery town and village of a thousand inhabitants. This great businessof making knowledge universally accessible is well in hand; it has goneso far that it must go on till the work is complete.
In this country, too, if nowhere else, there is so near an approach toperfect freedom of thinking, that scarcely any one, whose conduct isgood, suffers inconvenience from professing any extreme or eccentricityof mere opinion. I constantly meet, in New England villages, men whodiffer as widely as possible from their neighbors on the most dividingof all subjects; but if they are good citizens and good neighbors, Ihave never observed that they were the less esteemed on that account.Their peculiarities of opinion become as familiar as the color of theirhair, or the shape of their every-day hat, and as inoffensive. This isa grand triumph of good sense and good nature; or, as Matthew Arnoldwould say, of the metropolitan over the provincial spirit. It is alsorecent. It was not the case fifty years ago. It was not the case twentyyears ago.
The steam-engine, and the wondrous machinery which the steam-enginemoves, have so cheapened manufactured articles, that a mechanic, in avillage, may have so sufficient a share of the comforts, conveniences,and decencies of life, that it is sometimes hard to say what realadvantage his rich neighbor has over him. The rich man used to have onetruly enviable advantage over others: his family was safer, in case ofhis sudden death. But a mechanic, who has his home paid for, his lifeinsured, and a year's subsistence accumulated, is as secure in thisrespect as, perhaps, the nature of human affairs admits. Now, anAmerican workingman, anywhere out of a few largest cities, can easilyhave all these safeguards around his family by the time he is forty;and few persons can be rich before they are forty.
We may say, perhaps, speaking generally, that, in the United States,there are no formidable obstacles to the attainment of substantialwelfare, except such as exist in the nature of things and in ourselves.
But in the midst of so many triumphs of man over material andimmaterial things, man himself seems to dwindle and grow pale. Not hereonly, but in all the countries that have l