, 1923-09-05
The Next War Is On

Considering that the war against rum has
been won, the Copenhagen congress, called for
the purpose of arranging the matter of repara-
tions growing out of the conflict, has settled in
the minds of the delegates that since permanent
peace is as hopeless in the moral as in the phys
ical sense, and that the prospect in both is for
just one war after another, it is time to grid
up the loins and go after that other scourge of
northumberland.
Professor Martin Hartmann of Leipsic, a
German delegate sounded the tocsin in the be-
ginning of the war upon the soothing weed.
Which declaration of war, or any declaration
OF war, comes quite appropriately from Ger
many. What luck the professor will have with
his declaration is another matter entirely. 1t
is the casus belli at this time that is more in
t~eresting, the contents of the pink book, than
the fact of the war itself.
Among other declarations the professor as
serts smoking tends to retard growth and has
caused a reduction in the height of Americans
and Englishmen in the last century,
All right profess, come over and look about
before you shoot the next load from your Big
Bertha in your war on nicotine. Look at our
dwarfed and stumbling race of Americans, look
ON the tennis courts, the golf links, the baseball
field, the boxing ring, the football gridiron, look
over the mob of spectators at any one of these
pastines. Puny, stunted, anemic Young people
that they are. 1t is "a shame that they are not
slaughtered before they breed another genera
ton, which by the inevitable law of nicotine's
progress must be even worse than the present
one.
1S'HS ~ aHN AACtS AboCl vi Jul holuC SIoMh
savants have from time to time warned of the
evil effects of the cigarette on the modern girl.
There she is, look her over. A shriveled,
b~loodless, helpless creature, coughing ner life
away in listlessnes, even ~fainting from sheer
weakness. How she has degenerated from
her mid ictorian grandmother who could sup
port the weight of boiler,iron corsets, crinolines
and quilted petticoats, because she had never
Slapped her vitality with Fatimas.
1t was unfortunate that one of Our own par
ticular generals in the war on nicotine could
not have been present at the congress to add to
Professor Hartmann's arraignment of tobacco
his testimony as to how, during the World War,
the Tobacco Trust had sent doped cigarels to
our army in France and how the American sol
diers had to be taken out of the ranks because
they were Slapped and corrupted by the drugs.
All of which was shameful when considering
how courageous and full of pep our boys could
have been If they never had touched the weed.
Now We are willing to leave it to the profess
scr himself. He saw the American boys a few
years ago when they crossed the Atlantic to save
the world from German Kultur, and again dur
ing their Watch on the Rhine, most of them used
tobacco in some form, did he notice, really and
truly anything wrong with their intelligence,
their physical condition, their stature, and last
but not least their nerve and fighting ability?
Confidentially, if the professor would so re-
ceive the information, we should like to tell him
that it was because of the superiority of Amer.
lean tobacco and in consequence, the superiority
of the men who used it, that therein lies the
reason why Germany did not win the war.