THE use of tobacco by any person, is a persistent and flagrant transgression of the rights of others. Persons claim the privilege of doing as they please; but no principle of law, gospel, or common sense allows any man to please himself by displeasing or annoying others. If a man had neither father, nor mother, nor wife, nor child, nor friend; if he lived as a hermit in a hole on some desert island, untrodden by any human foot, he might perhaps claim the natural right to do as he pleased, provided there was no God and he was without moral responsibility. But it is impossible for society to exist unless men consent to the abridgment of their personal rights or privileges, and learn to consider and respect the rights and inclinations of others. All law is based upon the principle that the inclinations of the individual must yield to the good of the community. He who refuses to accept this principle of action, speedily finds himself an outlaw. He arrays himself against society, and society avenges itself upon him by compelling him to submit to wholesome authority. No man moving in society has a right to make himself a nuisance or an occasion of offense to others. He is bound to observe the proprieties and decencies of life. As a member of society he must do nothing by which society itself would be subverted. No man living has a right to defile the water I drink. No man living has the right to poison the air I breathe. Every man who uses tobacco is continually doing this thing. He burns his filthy cigar or nauseous pipe, drawing smoke into his mouth and then puffing it out for me to inhale. What right has he to poison the air I breathe? What right has he to give me the headache, or in any way deprive me of the privilege of breathing the vital air which God has made necessary to my very life? If he could get away beyond all human fellowship, where no one could see him, hear him, or be in any way affected by his conduct, the case would be different; but he intrudes himself upon others, he poisons the air I breathe, and seems to imagine that he has a perfect right to do this; and that I have no right whatever to object to his doing it. He is mistaken. It is not only my right, but my duty to protest against his impudence and selfishness. No man has a right to poison his wife, or make his children sick, by the use of tobacco. Thousands are, nevertheless, doing it from day to day. Helpless women, little children, feeble and sensitive, suffer headache, nausea, and untold disgust, because some selfish and uncourteous man claims the privilege of doing as he pleases in regard to personal habits, without respect to the rights of those around him. Such men have mistaken their position. They may be able, under the law of brute force, to do as they please, but under the higher law of right and propriety they are unquestionably condemned.
One marked effect of the use of narcotics seems to be to blunt the conscience and render the mind insensible to delicate moral and equitable distinction, consequently men, without the slightest apparent sense of impropriety, commit the greatest breaches of public courtesy. A man has no more right to smoke in my face than he has to spit in my face; and yet I can hardly go on the street, without being sickened by the nauseous puffing of some smoker who seems to have no more idea that he is making a nuisance of himself than a Fejee Islander has of the indecency of going naked. If these men who do this could know the loathing which they cause in the minds of men and women whom they meet from day to day, it is certain that unless their consciences and sensibilities were thoroughly calloused they would rid themselves of a habit so uncourteous to others and so unjust to themselves.