The Manchester Physical Health Culture Society meets now at the Coal Exchange. This has its disadvantages as well as its advantages when compared with the Technical School, where the earlier meetings of the Society were held. It is impossible to shut out street noises in that busy centre, and a speaker must have a powerful voice to compete with them. Mr. E. Oliver Duerr, who was the lecturer at last night╒s meeting, has a voice of very small range and a hurried, indistinct enunciation, so that, on the whole, it was something of a trial to persons at the back of the hall to follow him. Mr. Duerr╒s subject was ╥Smoking.╙ His address (writes one of our representatives) had no pretensions to literary form, but consisted simply of a mass of statistics and scientific opinions without the semblance of arrangement. This method of lecturing has its drawbacks. Mr. Duerr had been speaking for an hour and a quarter when a part of the audience stopped him. If instead of eighteen heads ╤ which were not heads ╤ he had arranged his subject under three divisions and given it a form, he would have found it possible to say all that he wished to say or needed to say in twenty minutes. As it was, he left scarcely any time for discussion. Mr. Duerr said it was only in Anglo-Saxon countries that women did not smoke. But is he not over-hasty in excepting Anglo-Saxon countries? Who would have known that Mr. Carlyle and Harriet Martineau smoked their pipes if they had not been distinguished for other things? A lady who was prominent in the women╒s movement and who died in Manchester not so very long ago found relaxation in the intervals of her public labours in smoking a strong cigar. There is probably a great deal more smoking among the undistinguished mass of women than careless observers think. Scotland is largely an Anglo-Saxon country, and in Montrose smoking among the women, at least of the fishing population, is only less general than among the men. There you see them, in the evening and after their day╒s labours, sitting on the upturned boats which they have helped to beach or on their own doorsteps pulling at their short clay pipes with contentment written upon their brows. Mr. Duerr would tell them that there is enough nicotine in their tobacco to poison the whole of them if they would take the trouble to extract it and swallow it as nicotine pure and unmitigated. The same thing has been said of carrots except that it is arsenic in that vegetable; and yet everybody eats carrots. Napoleon did not smoke, says Mr. Duerr, and neither does Lord Roberts. But Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo and died a prisoner, and Lord Roberts declared the Boer war to be over before it had reached the middle of its course. Carlyle smoked and he wrote ╥The Lotus Eaters.╙ If Dr. Parker hated smoking, as Mr. Duerr tells us, did not the late Mr. Spurgeon have smokeroom accommodation provided for his special convenience at the conferences of the Baptist denomination, and does not our own Bishop of Manchester smoke a pipe before he writes a controversial letter? The martyrs did not smoke, the lecturer declared with triumph, but hardly with accuracy, for we read in the martyrologies that the smoke of many of the martyrs had valuable hygiene properties in countries afflicted with false ideals and religious stagnation. There are 50 diseases which spring from or are aggravated by smoking. The tobacco habit damages the eyes, it reduces the temperature, it affects nutrition on both sides of the skull, for while it impairs the brain it also causes the hair to fall out, it makes otherwise honourable and human men selfish in the society of non-smoking ladies and children, and it keeps the working classes from attending public worship. In these conclusions Mr. Duerr and his authorities agree. In short, it was set down that all tobacco should be reduced to a solution which it seems would be found useless for killing snakes ╤ once you have caught them ╤ and for washing sheep. If smokers will not give it to the snakes or wash sheep with it, but will obstinately smoke it notwithstanding this warning, they are requested by Mr. Duerr and one of his quoted authorities to inhale the smoke itself into their lungs and there retain it to be absorbed. If they will deprive the snakes of a most effectual poison and the sheep of a superior wash, let them at least consume their own smoke and not pollute the atmosphere in defiance of the rights of non-smoking man. If they would give the snakes and the sheep their due but feel unable to make the sacrifice let them, Mr. Duerr advised, give up breakfast and supper, let them give up tea and coffee, and soon they will give up all their bad habits naturally and without conscious effort. Mr. Duerr said many wise things in denunciation of juvenile smoking and of the pernicious habit of inhaling the smoke of cigarettes. To frighten these young smokers Mr. Duerr exhibited a book called ╥The Cigarette Smoker,╙ which has on its cover the picture of a skull and crossbones constructed of cigarettes, and he gave a number of awful examples which only an American doctor with a book in his mind could discover.
