Youthful Cigarette-Smokers.
THIS is a nuisance against which brokers and others have protested in vain. "We suffer more from the intolerable nuisance of cigarette-smoking than any other business men," said a Broad Street broker yesterday, "because there are so many boys and young men, messengers, runners, and clerks, constantly eddying in and out of the office. Few people know how general the habit of smoking cheap paper cigarettes has become, and fewer still know how disagreeable and obnoxious it is to men who sit in their offices and receive the smoke in their faces all day long." Scattered about the walls on all sides of the office were signs: "No cigarette-smoking here!" "Leave your cigarettes with the janitor!" "Put out that cigarette!" "No smoking of cigarettes!" Some of the signs were new and bright, while others were dim and dusty. In spite of them every third or fourth boy of the stream that constantly passed in through the swinging doors puffed a paper cigarette. "They are used to the signs now," said the broker, with a surly frown toward the careless offenders, "and don't pay any attention to them. Nearly all the offices in this district have made an effort to stop the vice. Both my partner and myself smoke cigars—you see I'm smoking now—but we can't stand the cigarette nuisance. If the boys smoked tobacco it would be all right, but the infernal mixture of sea-weed, burned straw, old rags, and gutta-percha, with which common cigarettes are filled, makes the smoke disagreeable to the last degree." "Do you think the habit is still spreading?" "It increases every day. We began a crusade against it five years ago or more, and we were joined by every broker's office of importance in New York, but the smokers increase constantly. You see, the cigarettes are now sold as cheap as nine cents a package, there being twenty in a package. This price is within the means of every boy, and, as it is the fashion to smoke, the youngsters all fall in line." There are a number of business men who make it a rule never to employ cigarette-smokers. The rules in the messenger service stations are also very severe. "If you start a boy out," said the manager of a station near the Fifth Avenue hotel, "with a message in one hand, and twenty cigarettes in the other, the message will never get to its destination before at least half the cigarettes are smoked. So we make stringent rules concerning smoking, and punish the boys if they break them. I can pick out a cigarette-smoking boy any time. The habit makes them pallid, lazy, and impudent."