One of the things you will find out is that your stomach is easily fooled; it is largely guided by bulk. If you eat a meal consisting of a moderate quant.i.ty of lean meat, a very little bread, a heaping dish of turnip greens, and a big slice of watermelon, you will feel fully satisfied, yet you will not have taken in one-third the calory value that you would at an ordinary meal with gravies and dressings and dessert. The bulky kind of food is that for which your system was adapted in the days when it was shaped by nature. You have a large stomach, many times as large as you would have had if you had lived on refined and concentrated foods such as b.u.t.ter, sugar, olive oil, cheese and eggs. You have a long intestinal tract, adapted to slowly digesting foods, and to the work of extracting nutrition from a ma.s.s of roughage.
You have a very large lower bowel, which Metchnikoff, the Russian scientist, one of the greatest minds who ever examined the problems of health, declares a survival, the relic of a previous stage of evolution, and a source of much disease. The best thing you can do with that lower bowel is to give it lots of hay, as it requires; in other words, to eat the salads and greens which contain cellulose material. This contains no food value, and does not ferment, but fills the lower bowel and stimulates it to activity.
If you eat too much food, three things may happen. First, it may not be digested, and in that case it will fill your system with poisons.
Second, it may be a.s.similated, but not burned up by the body. In that case it has to be thrown out by the kidneys or the sweat glands, and this puts upon these organs an extra strain, to which in the long run they may be unequal. Or third, the surplus material may be stored up as fat. This is an old-time trick which nature invented to tide you over the times when food was scarce. If you were a bear, you would naturally want to eat all you could, and be as fat as possible in November, so that you might be able to hunt your prey when you came out from your winter"s sleep in April. But you are not a bear, and you expect to eat your regular meals all winter; you have established a system of civilization which makes you certain of your food, and the place where you keep your surplus is in the bank, or sewed up in the mattress, or hidden in your stocking. In other words, a civilized man saves money, and the habit of storing globules of grease in the cells of his body is a survival of an old instinct, and a needless strain upon his health.
Not merely does the fat man have to carry all the extra weight around with him, but his body has to keep it and tend it; and what are the effects of this is fully shown by life insurance tables. People who are five or ten per cent over weight have five or ten per cent more chance of dying all the time, while people who are five or ten per cent under weight have five or ten per cent more than the average of life expectation. There is no answer to these figures, which are the result of the tabulation of many hundreds of thousands of cases. The meaning of them to the fat person is to put himself on a diet of lean meat, green vegetables and fresh fruits, until he has brought himself down, not merely to the normal fatness of the civilized man, but to the normal leanness of the athlete, the soldier on campaign, and the student who has more important things to think about than stuffing his stomach.
There is, of course, a certain kind of leanness which is the result of ill health. There are wasting diseases; tuberculosis, for example, and anemia. There are people who worry themselves thin, and there are a few rare "spiritual" people, so-called, who fade away from lack of sufficient interest in their bodies. That is not the kind of leanness that I mean, but the active, wiry leanness, which sometimes lives a hundred years. Nearly always you will find that such people are spare eaters; and you will find that our ideal of rosy plumpness, both for adults and children, is a wholly false notion. We once had in our home as servant an Irish girl, who was what is popularly called "a picture of health," with those beautiful flaming cheeks that Irish and English women so often have. She was in her early twenties, and n.o.body who knew her had any idea but that her health was perfect. But one morning she was discovered in bed with one side paralyzed, and in a couple of weeks she was dead with erysipelas. The color in her cheeks had been nothing but diseased blood vessels, overloaded with food material; and with the blood in that condition, one of the tiny vessels in the brain had become clogged.
In the same way I have seen children, two or three years old, plump and rosy, and considered to be everything that children should be; but pneumonia would hit them, and in two or three days they would be at death"s door. I do not mean that children should be kept hungry; on the contrary, they should have four or five meals a day, so that they do not have a chance to become too hungry. But at those meals they should eat in great part the bulky foods, which contain the natural salts needed for building the body. If a child asks for food, you may give it an apple, or you may give it a slice of bread and b.u.t.ter with sugar on it.
The child will be equally well content in either case; but it is for you, with your knowledge of food values, to realize that the bread with b.u.t.ter and sugar contains two or three times as much nutriment as the apple, but contains practically none of the precious organic salts which will make the child"s bones and teeth.
So far I have discussed this subject as if all foods grew on bushes outside your kitchen door, and all you had to do was to go and pick off what you wanted. But as a matter of fact, foods cost money, and under our present system of wage slavery, the amount of money the average person can spend for food is strictly limited. In a later book I am going to discuss the problem of poverty, its causes and remedies. All that I can do here is to tell you what foods you ought to have, and if society does not pay you enough for your work to enable you to buy such foods, you may know that society, is starving you, and you may get busy to demand your rights as human beings. Meantime, however, such money as you do have, you want to spend wisely, and the vast majority of you spend it very unwisely indeed.
In the first place, a great many of the simplest and most wholesome foods are cheap--often because people do not know enough to value them.
We insist upon having the choice cuts of meats, because they are more tender to the teeth, but the cheaper cuts are exactly as nutritious. We insist upon having our meats loaded with fat, although fatness is an abnormal condition in an animal, and excess of fat is a grave error in diet. I live in a country where jack rabbits are a pest, and in the market they sell for perhaps one-fourth the cost of beef, and yet I can hardly ever get them, because people value them so little as food; they prefer the meat of a hog which has been wallowing in a filthy pen, and has been deliberately made so fat that it could hardly walk!
I have already spoken of prunes, a much despised and invaluable food.
All the dried fruits are rich in food values, and if we could get them untreated by chemicals, they would be worth their cost. I was brought up to despise the cheaper vegetables, such as cabbage and turnips; I never tasted boiled cabbage until I was forty, and then to my great surprise I made the discovery that it is good. Raw cabbage is as valuable as any other salad; it is a trifle harder to digest for some people, but I do not believe in pampering the stomach. Both potatoes and rice are cheap and wholesome, if only we would get unpolished rice, and if we would leave the skins on the potatoes until after they are cooked. Nearly all the mineral salts of the potato are just under the outer skin, and are removed by the foolish habit of peeling them.
The prices of food differ so widely at different seasons and in different parts of the world, that there is not much profit in trying to figure how cheaply a person can live. I have found that I spend for the diet I have indicated here, from sixty to eighty cents a day. I do not buy any fancy foods, but on the other hand, I do not especially try to economize; I buy what I want of the simple everyday foods in their season. Most everyone will find that it is a good business proposition to buy the foods which he needs to keep in health. If the average workingman would add up the money he spends, not merely in the restaurants, but in the candy stores, the drug stores, the tobacco stores, and the offices of doctors and dentists, he would find, I think, that he could afford to buy himself the necessary quant.i.ty of wholesome natural foods. For a family of three, in the place where I live, enough of these foods can be purchased for a dollar a day, and this is about one-fourth what common labor is being paid, and one-eighth of what skilled labor is being paid. I will specify the foods: a pound and a half of shoulder steak, a loaf of whole wheat bread or a box of shredded wheat biscuit, a head of cabbage, a pound of prunes, and four or five pounds of apples.
There are many ways of saving in the purchase of food if you put your mind upon it. If you are buying prunes, you may pay as high as fifty cents or a dollar a pound for the big ones, and they are not a bit better than the tiny ones, which you can buy for as low as eight cents a pound in bulk. When bread is stale, the bakers sell it for half price, despite the fact that only then has it become fit to eat. If you buy canned peaches, you will pay a fancy price for them, and they will be heavy with cane sugar; but if you inquire, you find what are known as "pie peaches," put up in gallon tins without sugar, and at about half the price. The butcher will sell you what he calls "hamburg steak" at a very low price, and if you let him prepare it out of your sight, he will fill it with fat and gristle; but let him make some while you watch, and then you have a very good food. One of my diet rules is that I do not trust the capitalist system to fix me up any kind of mixed or ground or prepared foods. I have not eaten sausage since I saw it made in Chicago.
Also there is something to know about the cooking of foods, since it is possible to take perfectly good foods and spoil them by bad cooking.
Once upon a time our family discovered a fireless cooker, and thought that was a wonderful invention for an absent-minded author and a wife who is given to revising ma.n.u.scripts. But recent investigations which have been made into the nature of the "vitamines," food ferments which are only partly understood, suggest that prolonged cooking of food may be a great mistake. The starch has to be cooked in order to break the cell walls by the expansion of the material inside. Twenty minutes will be enough in the case of everything except beans, which need to be cooked four or five hours. Meat should be eaten rare, except in the case of pork, which harbors a parasite dangerous to the human body; therefore pork should always be thoroughly cooked. The white of eggs is made less digestible by boiling hard or frying. Eggs should never be allowed to boil; put them on in cold water, and take them off as soon as the water begins to boil. It is not necessary to cook either fresh fruit or dried.
The dried fruits may be soaked and eaten raw, but I find that several fruits, especially apples and pears, do not agree with me well if they are eaten raw, so I stew them for fifteen or twenty minutes. I have no objection to canned fruits and vegetables, provided one takes the trouble in opening them to make sure there is no sign of spoiling. If you put up your own fruits, do not put in any sugar. All you have to do is to let them boil for a few minutes, and to seal them tightly while they are boiling hot. The whole secret of preserving is to exclude the air with its bacteria.
If you live on a farm, you will have no trouble in following the diet here outlined, for you can produce for yourselves all the foods that I have recommended; only do not make the mistake of shipping out your best foods, and taking back the products of a factory, just because you have read lying advertis.e.m.e.nts about them. Take your own wheat and oats and corn to the mill, and have it ground whole, and make your own breads and cereals. Try the experiment of mixing whole corn meal with water and a little salt, and baking it into hard, crisp "corn dodgers." I do not eat these--but only because I cannot buy them, and have no time to make them.
Another common article of food which I do not recommend is salted and smoked meats. I do not pretend to know the effects of large quant.i.ties of salt and saltpetre and wood smoke upon the human system, but I know that Dr. Wiley"s "poison squad" proved definitely that a number of these inorganic minerals are injurious to health, and I prefer to take fresh meat when I can get it. I use a moderate quant.i.ty of common salt on meat and potatoes, because there seems to be a natural craving for this. I know that many health enthusiasts insist that I am thus putting a strain on my kidneys, but I will wait until these health enthusiasts make clear to me why deer and cattle and horses in a wild state will travel many miles to a salt-lick. I have learned that it is easy to make plausible statements about health, but not so easy to prove them. For example, I was told that it is injurious to drink water at meals, and for years I religiously avoided the habit; but it occurred to some college professor to find out if this was really true, and he carried on a series of experiments which proved that the stomach works better when its contents are diluted. The only point about drinking at meals is that you should not use the liquid to wash down your food without chewing it.
I can suggest two other ways by which you may save money on food. One is by not eating too much, and another is by eating all that you buy. The amount of food that is wasted by the people of America would feed the people of any European nation. The amount of food that is thrown out from any one of our big American leisure cla.s.s hotels would feed the children of a European town. I think it may fairly be described as a crime to throw into the garbage pail food which might nourish human life. In our family we have no garbage pail. What little waste there is, we burn in the stove, and my wife turns it into roses. It consists of the fat which we cannot help getting at the butcher"s, and the bones of meat, and the skins of some fruits and vegetables. It would never enter into our minds to throw out a particle of bread, or meat, or other wholesome food. If we have something that we fear may spoil, we do not throw it out, but put it into a saucepan and cook it for a few minutes.
If you will make the same rule in your home, you will stop at least that much of the waste of American life; and as to the big leisure cla.s.s hotels, and the banquet tables of the rich--just wait a few years, and I think the social revolution will attend to them!
CHAPTER XXII
FOODS AND POISONS
(Concludes the subject of diet, and discusses the effect upon the system of stimulants and narcotics.)
A few years ago there died an old gentleman who had devoted some twenty years of his life to teaching people to chew their food. Horace Fletcher was his name, and his ideas became a fad, and some people carried them to comical extremes. But Fletcher made a real discovery; what he called "the food filter." This is the automatic action of the swallowing apparatus, whereby nature selects the food which has been sufficiently prepared for digestion. If you chew a mouthful of food without ever performing the act of swallowing, you will find that the food gradually disappears. What happens is that all of it which has been reduced to a thin paste will slip unnoticed down your throat, and you may go on putting more food into your mouth, and chewing, and can eat a whole meal without ever performing the act of swallowing. Fletcher claimed that this is the proper way to eat, and that you can train yourself to follow this method. I have tried his idea and adopted it. One of my diet rules, to which there is no exception, is that if I haven"t the time to chew my food properly, I haven"t the time to eat; I skip that meal.
The habit of bolting food is a source of disease. To be sure, the carnivorous animals bolt their food, but they are tougher than we are, and do not carry the burden of a large brain and a complex nervous system. If you swallow your meals half chewed, and wash them down with liquids, you may get away with it for a while, but some day you will pay for it with dyspepsia and nervous troubles. And the same thing applies to your habit of jumping up from meals and rushing away to work, whether it be work of the muscles, or of brain and nerves. Proper digestion requires the presence of a quant.i.ty of blood in the walls of the stomach and digestive tract. It requires the attention of your subconscious mind, and this means rest of muscles and brain centers. If you cannot rest for an hour after meals, omit that meal, or make it a light one, of fruit juices, which are almost immediately absorbed by the stomach, and of salads, which do not ferment. You may rest a.s.sured that it will not hurt you to skip a meal, and make up for it when you have time to be quiet. I have been many times in my life under very intense and long continued nervous strain; for example, during the Colorado coal strike, I led a public demonstration which kept me in a state of excitement all the day and a good part of the night several weeks. During this period I ate almost nothing; a baked apple and a cup of custard would be as near as I would go to a meal, and as a result I came through the experience without any injury whatever to my health. I lost perhaps ten pounds in weight, but that was quickly made up when I settled back to a normal way of life.
I have been on camping trips when I had a great deal of hard work to do, carrying a canoe long distances on my back, or paddling it forty miles a day. On the mornings of such a trip I have seen a guide cook himself an elaborate breakfast of freshly baked bread, bacon, and even beans, and make a hearty meal and then go straight to work. My meal, on the contrary, would consist of a small dish of stewed prunes, or perhaps some huckleberries or raspberries, if they could be found. I will not say that I could do as much as the guide, because he was used to it, and I was not. But I can say this--if I had eaten his breakfast at the start of the day, I would have been dead before night; and I mean the word "dead" quite literally. I know a man who started to climb Whiteface mountain in the Adirondacks. He climbed half way, and then ate lunch, which consisted of nine hard boiled eggs. Then he started to climb the rest of the mountain, and dropped dead of acute indigestion.
There are few poisons which can affect the system more quickly, or more dangerously, than a ma.s.s of food which is not digested. The stomach is an ideal forcing-house for the breeding of bacteria. It provides warmth and moisture, and you, in your meal, provide the bacteria and the material upon which they thrive. Under normal conditions, the stomach pours out a gastric juice which kills the bacteria; but let this gastric juice for any reason be lacking--because your nervous energy has gone somewhere else, or because your blood-stream, from which the gastric juice must be made, has been drawn away to the muscles by hard labor; then you have a yeast-pot, with great quant.i.ties of gases and poisons.
In acute cases the results are evident enough: violent pains and convulsions, followed by coma and the turning black of the body. But what you should understand is that you may produce a milder case of such poisoning, and may do it day after day habitually, and little by little your vital organs will be weakened by the strain.
It does not make any difference at what hour of the twenty-four you take the great bulk of your food. It is one of the commonest delusions that you get some strengthening effect from your food immediately, and must have this strength in order to do hard work. To be sure, there are substances, such as grape-sugar, which require practically no digesting; you can hold them in the mouth, and they will be digested by the saliva, and absorbed at once into the blood-stream. But unless you have been starved for a long period you do not need to get your strength in this rush fashion. If you ate your normal meals on the previous day, your blood-stream is fully supplied with nutriment which has been put through a long process of preparation, and you can get up in the morning and work all day, if necessary, upon what is already in your system. To be sure, you may feel hungry, and even faint, but that is merely a matter of habit; your system is accustomed to taking food and expects it. But if you are a laborer doing hard work, you can easily train yourself to eat a light meal in the morning, and another light meal at noon, and to eat a hearty meal when your work is done and you can rest. Two light meals and a hearty meal are all that any system needs, and you can prove it to yourself by trying it, and watching your weight once a week.
I have tried many experiments, and the conclusion to which I have come is that there is no virtue in any particular meal-hours or any particular number of meals. For several years I tried the experiment of two meals a day. I was living a retired life, and had little contact with the world, and I would make a hearty meal at ten o"clock in the morning, and another at five in the afternoon. But later on I found that inconvenient, and now I take a light breakfast, and two moderate-sized meals at the conventional hours of lunch and dinner. I can arrange my own time, so after meal times is when I get my reading done. Sometimes, when I am tired, I feel sleepy after meals, but I have learned not to yield to this impulse. I do not know how to explain this; I have observed that animals sleep after eating, and it appears to be a natural thing to do; but I know that if I go to sleep after a meal, nature makes clear to me that I have made a mistake, and I do not repeat it. I never eat at night, and always go to bed on an empty stomach, so I am always hungry when I open my eyes in the morning. I never know what it is not to be hungry at meal times, and my habits are so regular that I could set my watch by my stomach.
Another common habit which is harmful is eating between meals. I have known people who are accustomed to nibble at food nearly all the time.
Sh.e.l.ley records that he tried it as an experiment, thinking it might be a convenient way to get digestion done--but he found that it did not work. The stomach is apparently meant to work in pulses; to do a job of digesting, and then to rest and acc.u.mulate the juices for another job.
It will accustom itself to a certain regime, and will work accordingly, but if, when it has half digested a load of food, you pile more food in on top, you make as much trouble as you would make in your kitchen if you required your cook to prepare another meal before she has cleaned up after the last one. Three times a day is enough for any adult to eat.
Children require to eat oftener, because their bodies are more active, and they not merely have to keep up weight, but to add to it. The simplest way to arrange matters with children is to give them three good meals at the hours when adults eat, and then to give them a couple of pieces of fruit between breakfast and lunch, and again between lunch and supper. I have never seen a child who would not be satisfied with this, when once the habit was established.
I have already spoken of the cooking and serving of food. I consider that the "gastronomic art," as it is pompously called, is ninety-nine per cent plain rubbish. To be sure, if foods are appetizingly prepared, and look good and smell good and taste good, they will cause the gastric juices to flow abundantly, as the Russian scientist Pavlov has demonstrated by practical experiment with the stomach-pump. But I know without any stomach-pump that the best thing to make my gastric juices flow is hard work and a spare diet. When I come home from five sets of tennis, and have a cold shower and a rub-down, my gastric juices will flow for a piece of cold beefsteak and a cold sweet potato, quite as well as for anything that is served by a leisure cla.s.s "chef." Needless to say, I want food to be fresh, and I want it to be clean, but I have other things to do with my time and money than to pamper my appet.i.tes and encourage food whims.
If you have a grandmother, or ever had one, you know what grandmothers tell you about "hot nourishing food"; but I have tried the experiment, and satisfied myself that there is absolutely no difference in nourishing qualities between hot food and cold food. If you chew your food sufficiently, it will all be ninety-eight and six-tenths degree food when it gets to your stomach, and that is the way your stomach wants it. Of course, if you have been out in a blizzard, and are chilled, and want to restore the body temperature, a hot drink will be one of the quickest ways, and if the emergency is extreme, you may even add a stimulant. On the other hand, if you are suffering from heat, it is sensible to cool your body by a cold drink. But you should use as much judgment with yourself as you would with a horse, which you do not permit to drink a lot of cold water when he is heated up, and is going into his stall to stand still.
I have mentioned the word "stimulants," and this opens a large subject.
There are drugs which affect the body in two different ways: some excite the nerves, and through the nerves the heart and blood-stream, to more intense activity; others have the effect of deadening the nerves, and dulling the sense of exhaustion and pain. One of these groups is called stimulants, and the other is called narcotics; but as a matter of fact the stimulants are really narcotics, because they operate by dulling the nerves whose function it is to prevent the over-acc.u.mulation of fatigue poisons; in other words, they keep the nerves and muscles from knowing that they are tired, and so they go on working.
It is possible, of course, to conceive of an emergency in which that is necessary. Once upon a time, on a hunting trip, I had been traveling all day, and was caught in a rain storm, and exhausted and chilled to the bone; I had to make camp without a fire, so when I got the tent up I wrapped myself in blankets and drank a couple of tablespoons full of whiskey. That is the only time I have ever taken whiskey in my life, and it warmed me almost instantly, and did me no harm. In the same way there were two or three occasions when I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and could not sleep, and let the doctor give me a sleeping powder. But in each case I knew that I was fooling with a dangerous habit, and I did no more fooling than necessary. No one should make use of either stimulants or narcotics except in extreme emergency, and never but a few times in a lifetime. What you should do is to change your habits so that you will not need to over-strain.
All these drugs are habit forming; that is to say, they leave the body no better, and with a craving for a repet.i.tion of the relief. When you are tired, it is because your muscles and nerves are storing up fatigue poisons more rapidly than your blood-stream can get rid of them. You need to know about this condition, and exhaustion and pain are nature"s protective warning. If you put a stop to the warning, you are as unintelligent as the Eastern despots who used to cut off the head of the messenger who brought bad tidings. If, when you have a headache, you go into a drug store and let the druggist mix you one of those white fizzy drinks, what you are doing is not to get rid of the poisons in your blood-stream, but merely to reduce the action of your heart, so as to keep the blood from pressing so fast into the aching blood vessels and nerves. You may try that trick with your heart a number of times, but sooner or later you will try it once too often--your heart will stop a little bit quicker than you meant it to!
Drugs are poisons, and their action depends upon their poisoning some particular portion of the body, and temporarily paralyzing it. And bear this in mind, they are none the less poisonous because they are "natural" products. You can kill yourself by cyanide of pota.s.sium, which comes out of a chemist"s retort; but you can kill yourself just as dead with laudanum, which comes out of a plant, or with the contents of the venom sac of a snake. You are poisoning yourself none the less certainly if you use alcohol, which is made from the juices of beautiful fruits, and has had hosts of famous poets writing songs about it; or you can poison yourself with the caffein which you get in a lovely brown bean which comes from Brazil, fragrant to the nostrils and delicious to the taste. You may drink wine and tea and coffee for a hundred years, and have your picture published in the newspapers as a proof that these habits conduce to health; but nothing will be said about the large number of people who practiced these habits, and didn"t live so long, and about how long they might have lived if they hadn"t practiced these habits.
I was brought up in the South, and my "elders" belonged to a generation which had grown up in war time. For this reason many of the men both drank and smoked to excess, and in my boyhood I lived among them and watched them, and with the help of advice from a wise mother, I conceived a horror of every kind of stimulant. The alcoholic poets could not fool me; I had been in the alcoholic wards of the hospitals. I had seen one man after another, beautiful and kindly and gracious men, dragged down into a pit of torment and shame.
Alcohol is, I think, the greatest trap that nature ever set for the feet of the human race. It is responsible for more degradation and misery than any other evil in the world; and I say this, knowing well that my Socialist friends will cry, "What about Capitalism?" My answer is that I doubt if there ever would have been any Capitalism in the world, if it had not been for alcohol. If the workers had not been systematically poisoned, and all their savings taken from them by the gin-mill, they would never have submitted to the capitalist system, they would have built the co-operative commonwealth at the time they were building the first factories. I listen to the arguments of my radical friends about "personal liberty," but I note that in Russia, when it was a question of making a practical revolution and keeping it alive, the first thing the leaders did was to drag out the contents of the wine-cellars of the palaces, and smash them in the gutters.
Tea and coffee are, of course, much milder in their effects than alcohol; you can play with them longer, and the punishment will be less severe. But if you make habitual use of them, you will pay the penalty which all drugs exact from the system. Your brain and your nerve centers will be less sensitive, less capable of working except under the influence of drugs; their reacting power will be dulled, and they will wear out more quickly. I have watched the slaves of the "morning cup of coffee," and know how they suffer when they do not get it. Likewise, I have watched the tea drinkers. It is comical to live in England, and see all the able-bodied men obliged to leave their work at four o"clock in the afternoon, and seek the regular stimulus for their tired nerves. If you are to meet anybody, it is always for "tea" that the ceremony is set, and if you refuse to drink tea, your hostess will be uncomfortable, unable to talk about anything but the strange, incredible notion that one can live without tea. I discovered after a while the solution of this problem; I would say that I preferred a little hot water, if you please, and so my hostess would pour me a cup of hot water, and I would sit and gravely sip it, and everybody would be perfectly content: I was conforming to the outward appearance of normality, which is what the British conventions require.
I have never drunk a cup of coffee, so I do not know what its effect on me would be. But some fifteen years ago I drank a gla.s.s of very weak iced tea at eight o"clock in the evening, and did not get to sleep until four or five the next morning. So I know that there is really a drug in tea. I know also that I might accustom my system to it, just as I might learn to poison my lungs with nicotine without being made immediately and suddenly ill; but why should I wish to do this? Life is so interesting to me that I do not need to stimulate my brain centers in order to appreciate the thrill of it. And when I am tired, I can rest myself by listening to music, or by reading a worth-while novel--things which I have found do not leave the after effects of nicotine.
I remember the first time I met Jack London. Our meeting consisted in good part of his "kidding" me, because I was lacking in the congenial vices of the cafe. He told me how much I had missed, because I had never been drunk; One ought to try the great adventure, at least once! Poor Jack is gone, because his kidneys gave out at forty; and nothing could seem more ungracious than to point out that I am still alive, and finding life enjoyable. Yet, in this book we are trying to find out how to live, and if there are habits which wreck and destroy a magnificent physique, and bring a great genius to death at the age of forty--surely the rest of us want to know about it, and to be warned in time. I mention Jack London in this connection, because he has said the last word on the subject of alcohol. Read "John Barleycorn," and especially read between the lines of it, and you will not need my argument to persuade you to be glad that the Eighteenth Amendment has been written into the Const.i.tution, and that it is your duty as a Socialist, not merely to obey it, but to vote for its enforcement.
I am proceeding on the a.s.sumption that your life is of importance to you; that you have a job to do which you know to be worth while, and to which you desire to apply your powers. You agree with me that the workers of the world are suffering, and that it is necessary for them to find their freedom, and that this takes hard work and hard thinking. You may say that I exaggerate the amount of harm that is done to the system by tea and coffee, alcohol and tobacco. Well, let us a.s.sume that in moderate quant.i.ties they do no harm at all: even so, I have the right to ask you to show that they do some good; otherwise, surely, it is a mistake for the workers to spend their savings upon them.
Consider, for example, the amount of money which the wage slaves of the world spend upon tobacco. Suppose they could be persuaded for two or three years to spend this amount upon good reading matter--do you not think there would be an improvement in their condition? Surely you cannot maintain that the use of tobacco is necessary to the activities of the brain! Surely you do not think that a man has to have a cigarette in order to stimulate his thoughts, or to smoke a pipe to rest himself after his work is done! I offer myself as evidence in such a controversy; I have written as many books as any man in the radical movement, and the sum total of my lifetime smoking amounts to one-half of one cigarette. I tried that when I was eight years old, and somebody told me a policeman would arrest me if he caught me, and I threw away the cigarette, and ran and hid in an alley, and have not yet got over my scare.
In the "Journal for Industrial Hygiene" for October, 1920, is an article ent.i.tled "Fatigue and Efficiency of Smokers in a Strenuous Mental Occupation." Experiments were conducted among telegraph operators, and the result showed that "the heavy smokers of the group show a higher output rate at the beginning of the day than the light smokers, but their rate falls off more markedly in the late hours, and their production for the whole day is definitely less than that of the light smokers. The heavy smokers also show less ability than the light smokers to respond to increasing pressure of work in the late hours of the day by handling their full share of the work presented."
One point upon which every medical authority agrees is--that the use of nicotine is of deadly effect upon the immature organism. Half-grown youths who smoke cigarettes will never be full-sized men; they will never have normal lungs or a normal heart. And likewise, all authorities agree about the effect of smoking upon the organism of women. I gave what little help I could to the task of helping to set women free, and to make them the equals of men; but I was always pained when I discovered that some of my feminist friends understood by woman"s emanc.i.p.ation no more than her right to adopt men"s vices. I would say to these ardent young female radicals, who cultivate the art of dangling a cigarette from their lower lip, and sip c.o.c.ktails out of coffee-cups in Greenwich Village cafes, that they will never be able to bear sound children; but I know that this would not interest them--they don"t want to bear any children at all. So I say that they will never be able to think straight thoughts, and will be nervous invalids when they are thirty.
We went to war to make the world safe for democracy, and we put several millions of our young men into armies, and if there were any of them who did not already know how to smoke cigarettes, they learned it under official sanction. So now we have a national tobacco bill that runs up to two billions, and will insure us a new generation of "Cla.s.s C"
rating. Speaking to the young radicals who are reading my books, I say: We want to make the world over, to make it a place of freedom and kindness, instead of the h.e.l.l of greed and hate that it is today. For that purpose we need a new moral code, and we can never win our victory without it. I have attended radical conventions, sitting in unventilated halls amid clouds of tobacco smoke, and listening to men wrangle all through the day and a great part of the night; I have watched the fatal dissensions in the movement, the quarrelings of the right wingers and the left wingers and all stages and degrees in between, and I have wondered--not jestingly, but in pitying earnest--how much of all those personalities and factional misunderstanding had their origin in carbon dioxide and nicotine. There is no use suggesting such ideas to the older men, whose habits are fixed; but a new generation is coming on, with a new vision of the enormous task before it; and is it too much to expect of these young men and women, that they shall realize in advance the grim tasks they have to do, and shall learn to run the machine of their body so as to get out of it the maximum amount of service? Is it too much to hope for, that some day we shall have a race of young fighters for truth and justice, who are willing to live abstemious lives, and consecrate themselves to the task of delivering mankind from wage slavery and war?