A hundred years ago
The municipal authorities of Coblen tz, Treves, and Saarlouis have passed a police regulation forbidding boys under the age of sixteen to smoke in the streets. Similar rules used to be enforced in our University towns, so far as undergraduates were concerned, though academic propriety rather than health may have been the object of these enactments; and the Oxford statutes still contain a threat of penalties against those who smoke the "nicotian herb which they call 'tobacco.' "The order is a curious evidence of the paternal spirit of German governments, but it is a natural result of universal military service that the physique of the future soldier should be jealously watched and improved by the State. The German medical faculty seems to have come to the conclusion that tobacco is bad for those who are still growing, and if, as seems certain, they are right, the municipalities of the three towns above mentioned have only, as guardians of public health, fixed their limit of age too low. Smoking reduces the appetite, and gives an artificial stay to the stomach, and this result, at a time when the system needs all the nourishment that can be supplied to aid growth, is a cause of stunted physique and reduced animal vitality. The statistics of shortsightedness in Germany which have been recently published may also have suggested to many minds tobacco smoking as a probable cause of myopia, no less than the reading of ill-printed books, with minute, old-fashioned type, or than the dry, dust-laden air of Brandenburg.
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