930 THE K I N G ’ S B US I NE S S it by a policy of silence. At last the Government has officially recognized the cigaret as a regular feature of the soldier’s equipment. For the present victory favors the Tobacco Trust.” Some force with evidently a large amount of money behind it is trying its best to make it appear patriotic to furnish the soldiers with cigarets and unpatriotic to say anything against their use. Even some of the leaders in the Y. M. C. A. have been swept off of their feet or influenced in some way. Mr. Fred B. Shipp, treasurer and general field secretary of the Y. M. C. A. War Work Council in France, has recently returned from a year’s labor in France. He writes in the N. Y. “ Times Magazine” very earnestly urging the absolute necessity of cigarets and sneeringly of those who oppose such use. He says, !‘ I remember par ticularly one preacher who came to France with the belief that he would save a lot of the soldiers from the tobacco evil. His personal feelings against tobacco were so strong that he felt himself unable to sell the weed in one of our canteens. This was not discovered until the clergyman had been put in charge of a hut immediately behind the lines. One night there was con siderable infantry activity in this sector. At dawn the walking cases among the wounded began returning to a rest-station far behind the ‘ Y ’ hut. A party of twelve or thirteen under a sergeant stopped at the hut. The secre tary-clergyman saw wounded men returning from the trenches for the first time. They said they were ‘broke’ and asked for chocolate. He gave it to them. He asked the men if they wanted, anything else. The. sergeant told him that the only other thing they needed was cigarets. They needed them badly. There was a supply in the hut. The anti-tobacco clergyman hesitated for about one-half second. Then his program for saving men from nicotine went by the board. ' He passed cigarets around to each of the wounded men. They departed for the rear. In a few minutes another group came along. They, too, needed something to smoke. Once more he abandoned his principles. A third group appeared. Again the cigarets were distributed. By this time, the clergyman discovered that his supply of matches was prac tically exhausted. The fourth batch of visitors completely consumed it. For the rest of the day this crusader against tobacco found himself doing the only thing that would enable him to look his wounded countrymen in the eye as they stopped at the hut for rest. He kept a cigaret glowing in -his own lips all day long so that each boy would be able to get a light!” These words need little comment, if any. Anyone of real sense whose mind is not blinded by his desire to play to the galleries and who has not been swept off of his feet by the present craze for the advance of the cigaret, knows perfectly well that a man who remained true to his principles could “ look his wounded countrymen in the eye” quite as well as one whose sym pathies ran away with his judgment and his principles and who “ kept a cigaret glowing in his own lips all day long so that each boy would be able to get a light.”, The Literary Digest expresses the opinion that the writer in the Northwestern Christian Advocate (whose article we have quoted in part above) will “ conceivably find all his anxieties over the use of tobacco among the soldiers allayed by the experience of one of his initiated fellow workers.” He certainly will not if he has good sense, as we have no doubt , he has. As the Literary Digest prints a whole page advertisement of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., Winston-Salem, for which it is paid a very high price, we could quite réadily understand why it should not have very much sympathy with the attack on the use of tobacco, and why it should print
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