Mark Twain on the Anti-Smoking Police

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Joe Bast

Joseph Bast is president and CEO of The Heartland Institute. Bast is the coauthor of 12 books, including Rebuilding America's Schools (1990), "Why We Spend Too Much on Health Care" (1992), "Eco-Sanity: A Common-Sense Guide to Environmentalism" (1994), and "Education & Capitalism" (2003). He is also the editor of the Climate Reconsidered Series and "Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming" (2015). His writing has appeared in Phi Delta Kappan, Economics of Education Review, Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, The Cato Journal, USA Today, and many of the country’s largest-circulation newspapers.

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Today’s Wall Street Journal reprinted a delightful five-paragraph excerpt from a 1893 essay by Mark Twain titled “The Moral Statistician.”  It is worth a few minutes of attention because it illustrates how far we’ve traveled from the days when politically incorrect truths could be voiced without fear of condemnation and censorship by the mainstream media.

Twain berates those “moral statisticians” who “are always ciphering out how much a man’s health is injured, and how much his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents he wastes in the course of ninety-two years’ indulgence in the fatal practice of smoking” and other enjoyable but unhealthy pursuits, including drinking coffee, playing billiards, and drinking wine. And yet, he adds, “you never try to find out how much solid comfort, relaxation, and enjoyment a man derives from smoking in the course of a lifetime (which is worth ten times the money he would save by letting it alone)….”

These are observations I’ve made for many years, including in my 2006 book Please Don’t Poop in My Salad (which is available for free on Heartland’s Web site). But voicing such opinions even in the years leading up to 2006 was an invitation to be denounced and defamed, and in the years since then the campaign to attack and demonize anyone opposing the nation’s war on tobacco has become even more fanatical.

So it was nice, and brave, of the folks at the Wall Street Journal to pull this essay out of the memory hole and share it with the newspaper’s 2.3 million readers. Too bad it won’t much affect the “ornery and unlovable” folks leading the anti-tobacco movement.

Here’s the complete excerpt at the Wall Street Journal, from Mark Twain’s 1893 essay “The Moral Statistician”:

I don’t want any of your statistics; I took your whole batch and lit my pipe with it.

I hate your kind of people. You are always ciphering out how much a man’s health is injured, and how much his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents he wastes in the course of ninety-two years’ indulgence in the fatal practice of smoking; and in the equally fatal practice of drinking coffee; and in playing billiards occasionally; and in taking a glass of wine at dinner, etc. etc. And you are always figuring out how many women have been burned to death because of the dangerous fashion of wearing expansive hoops, etc. etc. You never see more than one side of the question.

You are blind to the fact that most old men in America smoke and drink coffee, although, according to your theory, they ought to have died young. . . . And you never try to find out how much solid comfort, relaxation, and enjoyment a man derives from smoking in the course of a lifetime (which is worth ten times the money he would save by letting it alone), nor the appalling aggregate of happiness lost in a lifetime by your kind of people from not smoking. Of course you can save money by denying yourself all those little vicious enjoyments for fifty years; but then what can you do with it? What use can you put it to? Money can’t save your infinitesimal soul. All the use that money can be put to is to purchase comfort and enjoyment in this life; therefore, as you are an enemy to comfort and enjoyment where is the use of accumulating cash?

It won’t do for you to say that you can use it to better purpose in furnishing a good table, and in charities, and in supporting tract societies, because you know yourself that you people who have no petty vices are never known to give away a cent, and that you stint yourselves so in the matter of food that you are always feeble and hungry. . . .

What is the use of your saving money that is so utterly worthless to you? In a word, why don’t you go off somewhere and die, and not be always trying to seduce people into becoming as ornery and unlovable as you are yourselves, by your villainous “moral statistics”?