The Saint Paul globe. (St. Paul, Minn.) 1896-1905, 1897-04-05

Of wrathfUl disgust by Horace Greeley
at this display of malice and ignorance
in the paper he7 founded.
CHASING THE HE-WISP.
The lower house of the Wisconsin
legislature passed, under suspension of
the rules, a bill imposing a license of
$500 on dealers in cigarettes, and pro-
hibiting, under penalty of a heavy fine,
sales of them to minors. This improves
on the provisions of our act of 1895 that
punished with fine of $50, or thirty
/ days in Jail, any one who should sell,
give or furnish to any pupil cigarettes,
cigars or tobacco in any form. And we
apprehend that the Wisconsin statute
/ will prove exactly as effective as our
! own has, or has any of the other acts
/ IN other states to prevent boys from
/ initiating their elders. There has been,
! we believe, no case of conviction I'M
/ der our law, of, if there has, it has
not. deferred boys from getting and
smoking the weed in any form they
prefer.
The state of Washington, some years
/ ago, under the impact of these rainbow
! chasers, prohibited the sale of cigar
! cites, with the sole result that any one
! wishing to smoke them mad only to buy
! of the tobaccOnist the tobacco and
! paper separately and roll his own cigar
! pttnS IT did NOT 1oeeo,, ~ ~, ,Ixi,,rr - - !
only succeeded in teaching the boys
/ how to make cigarettes. Should the
| Wisconsin phase Of the eternal pursuit
/ of this elusive Wfll-o'- they isp pass
the senate, no more. ready-made cigar
/ cites will be sold there, for no one
| could afford to pay the license; but not
! fewer cigarettes viii be smoked, prob
! ably more, but they will be homemade.
All such legislation takes no note Of
boy nature, or of the immense inf1u-
/ ence on it of thes example of men.
/ There is no boy with any spirit who
will not make extra exertions to in
/ dulge himself in any pastime. whose
4 evils he cannot understand, if it be
/ forbidden to him. In the days when
/ good, piOus parents looked on cards as
/ implements Of his Satanic majesty,
! their boys cOvertly played them in the
/ haymOWs or garrets, and played the
1 more persistently because they were
! eating forbidden fruit We have no
! doubt that, had Old Mother Eve been
/ enjOined to eat Of the fruit of that
/ tree, instead of being ordered not to
! she would never have cared to see how
/ it tasted, and all the tremendous trail
Of direful consequences to her descend
4 ants would have been avoided
! It may be, or it may not be. that
/ our remote ancestors We're monkeys;
/ but whether the ingeniously sustained
! conjecture is correct or not, we pos
/ sess their imitativeness in scarcely
/ diminished force. Boys ambition to be
manlike leads them to initiate mems
habits, and no man who can ever recall
/ his first cigar fails to recall with it
/ the swelling pride with which he puffed
/ from his mouth the evidence, cOncIu-
]
/ a man very fast. The resulting expert
! ence, also, will have hardly become OBJ
/ solete in his memory. Even before the
ordinary boy dares attack the pipe or
! cigar he dalies with the rattan and
puffs the acrid smoke with gusto, or
/ fills pipe with dried mullen leaves
/ and plays man. just as long as grown
men smoke tobacco and find apparent
/ or real enjoyment in it, just so long
will ambitious kids" initiate them,
/ unless home training persuades them
i out Of it. Surely neither state, nor home
| prohibition, nor fines on dealers will
| serve to prevent the willful youngsters
/ from having their way Wisconsin will
add but one more to her already large
/ stock Of dead-letter laws, should this
( bill pass r