Bill Nye on Tobacco. – A Discourager of Cannibalism
I am glad to notice a strong effort on the part of the friends of humanity to encourage those who wish to quit the use of tobacco. To quit the use of this weed is one of the most agreeable methods of relaxation. I have tried it a great many times, and I can safely say that it has afforded me much solid felicity.
To violently reform and cast away the weed and at the end of a week to find a good cigar unexpectedly in the quiet, unostentatious pocket of an old vest, affords the most intense and delirious delight.
Scientists tell us that a single drop of the concentrated oil of tobacco on the tongue of an adult dog is fatal. I have no doubt about the truth or cohesive power of this statement, and for that reason I have always been opposed to the use of tobacco among dogs. Dogs should shun the concentrated oil of tobacco, especially if longevity be any object to them. Neither would I advise a man who may have canine tendencies or a strain of that blood in his veins to use the concentrated oil of tobacco as a sozodont. To those who may feel that way about tobacco I would say, shun it by all means. Shun it as you would the deadly upas tree or the still more deadly whipple tree of the topics.
In what I may say under this head please bear in mind that I do not speak of the cigarette. I am now confining my remarks entirely to the subject of tobacco.
The use of the cigarette is, in fact, beneficial in in some ways, and no pest house should try to get along without it. It is said that they are very popular in the orient, especially in the lazar houses, where life would otherwise become very monotonous.
Scientists, who have been unable to successfully use tobacco and who therefore have given their whole lives and the use of their microscopes to the investigation of its horrors, say that cannibals will not eat the flesh of tobacco-using human beings. And yet we say to our missionaries: "No man can be a Christian and use tobacco."
I say, and I say it, too, with all that depth of feeling which has always characterized my earnest nature, that in this we are committing a great error.
What have the cannibals ever done for us as a people that we should avoid the use of tobacco in order to fit our flesh for their tables. In what way have they sought to ameliorate our condition in life that we should strive in death to tickle their palates.
Look at the history of the cannibal for past ages. Read carefully his record and you will see that it has been but the history of a selfish race. Cast your eye back over your shoulder for a century, and what do you find to be the condition of the cannibalists? A new missionary has landed a few weeks previous perhaps. A little group is gathered about on the beach beneath a tropical tree. Representative cannibals from adjoining islands are present. The odor of sanctity pervades the air.
The chief sits beneath a new umbrella, looking at the pictures in a large concordance. A new plug hat is hanging in a tree near by.
Anon the leading citizens gather about on the ground, and we hear the chief ask his attorney-general whether he will take some of the light or some of the dark meat.
That is all.
Far away in England the paper contains the following personal:
Wanted. – A young man to go as missionary to supply vacancy in one of the cannibal islands. He must fully understand the appetites and tastes of the cannibals, must be able to reach their inner nature at once, and must not use tobacco. Applicants may communicate in person or by letter.
Is it strange that under these circumstances those who frequented the cannibal islands during the last century should have quietly accustomed themselves to the use of a peculiarly pernicious, violent, and all-pervading brand of tobacco? I think not.
To me the statement that tobacco-tainted human flesh is offensive to the cannibal does not come home with crushing power.
Perhaps I do not love my fellow-man so well as the cannibal does. I know that I am selfish in this way, and if my cannibal brother desires to polish my wishbone he must take me as he finds me. I cannot abstain wholly from the use of tobacco in order to gratify the pampered tastes of one who has never gone out of his way to do me a favor.
Do I ask the cannibal to break off the pernicious use of tobacco because I dislike the flavor of it in his brisket? I will defy any respectable resident of the cannibal islands to-day to place his finger on a solitary instance where I have ever, by word or deed, intimated that he should make the slightest change in his habits on my account, unless it be that I may have suggested that a diet consisting of more anarchists and less human beings would be more productive of general and lasting good.
My own idea would be to send a class of men to these islands so thoroughly imbued with their great object and the oil of tobacco that the great Caucasian chowder of those regions would be followed by such weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth and such remorse and repentance and gastric upheavals that it would be as unsafe to eat a missionary in the cannibal islands as it is to eat ice-cream in the United States to-day.
Bill Nye's Arctic-le
The excitement consequent upon the anticipated departure of Mr. Gilder for the north pole has recently awakened in the bosom of the American people a new interest in what I may term that great terra incognita, if I may be pardoned for using a phrase from my own mother tongue.
Let us for a moment look back across the bleak waste of years and see what wonderful progress has been made in the discovery of the pole. We may then ask ourselves, who will be first to tack his location notice on the gnawed and season-cracked surface of the pole itself, and what will he do with it after he has so filed upon it?
Iceland, I presume, was discovered about 860 A. D., or 1,026 years ago, but the stampede to Iceland has always been under control, and you can get corner lots in the most desirable cities of Iceland, and wear a long rickety name with links in it like a rosewood sausage, to-day at a low price. Naddodr, a Norwegian viking, discovered Iceland A. D. 860, but he did not live to meet Lieutenant Greely or any of our most celebrated northern tourists. Why Naddodr yearned to go north and discover a colder country than his own, why he should seek to wet his feet and get icicles down his back in order to bring to light more snow-banks and chilblains, I cannot at this time understand. Why should a robust and prosperous viking roam around in the cold trying to nose out more frost-bitten Esquimaux, when he could remain at home and vike?
But I leave this to the thinking mind. Let the thinking mind grapple with it. It has no charms for me. Moreover, I haven't that kind of a mind.
Octher, another Norwegian gentleman, sailed around North cape and crossed the arctic circle in 890 A. D., but he crossed it in the night, and didn't notice it at the time.
Two or three years later, Erik the Red took a large snow-shovel and discovered the east coast of Greenland. Erik the Red was a Northman, and he flourished about the ninth century, and before the war. He sailed around in that country for several years, drinking bay rum and bear's oil and having a good time. He wore fur underclothes all the time, winter and summer, and evaded the poll-tax for a long time. Erik also established a settlement on the south-east coast of Greenland in about latitude 60 degrees north. These people remained here for some time, subsisting on shrimp salad, sea-moss farina, and neat's-foot oil. But finally they became so bored with the quiet country life and the backward springs that they removed from there to a land that is fairer than day, to use the words of another. They removed during the holidays, leaving their axle grease and all they held dear, including their remains.
From that on down to 1380 we hear or read varying and disconnected accounts of people who have been up that way, acquired a large red chilblain, made an observation, and died. Representatives from almost every quarter of the globe have been to the far north, eaten their little hunch of jerked polar-bear, and then the polar-bear has eaten his little hunch of jerked explorer, and so the good work went on.
The polar bear, with his wonderful retentive faculties, has succeeded in retaining his great secret regarding the pole, together with the man who came out there to find out about it. So up to 1380 a large number of nameless explorers went to this celebrated watering-place, shot a few pemmican, ate a jerked whale, shuddered a couple of times, and died. It has been the history of arctic exploration from the earliest ages. Men have taken their lives and a few doughnuts in their hands, wandered away into the uncertain light of the frozen north, made a few observations – to each other regarding the backward spring – and then cached their skeletons forever.
In 1380 two Italians named Lem took a load of sun-kissed bananas and made a voyage to the extreme north, but the historian says that the accounts are so conflicting, and as the stories told by the two brothers did not agree and neither ever told it the same on two separate occasions, the history of their voyage is not used very much.
Years rolled on, boys continued to go to school and see in their geographies enticing pictures of men in expensive fur clothing running sharp iron spears and long dangerous stab knives into ferocious white bears and snorting around on large cakes of cold ice and having a good time. These inspired the growing youth to rise up and do likewise. So every nation 'neath the sun has contributed its assortments of choice, white skeletons and second hand clothes to the remorseless maw of the hungry and ravenous north.
And still the great pole continued to squeak on through days that were six months long and nights that made breakfast seem almost useless.
In 1477 Columbus went up that way, but did not succeed in starving to death. He got a bird's-eye view of a large deposit of dark-blue ice, got hungry and came home.
During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the northern nations of Europe, and especially the Dutch, kept the discovery business red-hot, but they did not get any fragments of the true pole. The maritime nations of Europe, together with other foreign powers, dynasties, and human beings, for some time had spells of visiting the polar seas and neglecting to come back. It was the custom then as it is now, to go twenty rods farther than any other man had ever been, eat a deviled bootleg, curl up, and perish. Thousands of the best and brightest minds of all ages have yielded to this wild desire to live on sperm oil, pain-killer and jerked walrus, keep a little blue diary for thirteen weeks, and then feed it to a tall white bear with red gums.
That is not all. Millions of gallons of whiskey are sent to these frozen countries and used by the explorer in treating the untutored Esquimaux, who are not, and never will be, voters. It seems to me utterly ill-advised and shamefully idiotic.
Bill Nye's Answers to Correspondents
Capitalist – Will you kindly furnish your address once more? You must either stop moving about so or leave some one at home to represent you. Nothing is more humiliating to a literary man of keen sensibilities than to draw at sight and have the draft returned with the memorandum on the back in pencil "Gone to the White mountains," or "Gone to Lake Elmo on another bridal tour," or "Gone to Bayfield to be absent several years," or "Gone to Minnetonka to wait till the clouds roll by."
"Searcher," Peru, Ill. – Cum grano salis was the motto of the ancients, and was written in blue letters at the base of the shield on a field emerald, supported by a cucumber recumbent. The author is unknown.
"S. Q. G.," McGree's Prairie, Iowa, asks: "Do you know of any place where a young man can get a good living?"
That depends on what you call a good living, S. Q. G. If your stomach would not revolt at plain fare, such as poor people use, come up and stop at our house awhile. We don't live high, but we aim to eke out an existence, as it were. Come and abide with us, S. Q. G. Here is where the prince of Wales comes when he gets weary of being heir apparently to the throne. Here is where Bert comes when he has stood a long time, first on one leg and then on the other, waiting for his mother to evacuate said throne. He bids dull care begone, and clothing himself in some of my own gaudy finery he threads a small Limerick hook through the vitals of a long-waisted worm, as we hie us to the bosky dell where the plash of the pleasant-voiced brook replies to the turtle dove's moan. There, where the pale green plush of the moss on the big flat rocks deadens the footfall of Wales and me, where the tip of the long willow bough monkeys with the stream forever, where neither powers nor principalities, nor things present or things to come, can embitter us, we sit there, young Regina and me, and we live more happy years in twenty minutes than a man generally lives all his whole life socked up against a hard throne with the eagle eye of a warning constituency on him.
It's a good place to come, S. Q. G. Quiet but restful; full of balm for the wounded spirit and close up to nature's great North American heart. That's the idea. Perhaps I do not size you up accurately, S. Q. G. You may be a man who does not pant for the sylvan shade. Very likely you are a seaside resortist and do not care for pants, but I simply say to you that if you are a worthy young man weary with life's great battles – beaten back, perhaps, and wounded – with your neck knocked crooked like a tom-tit that has run against a telegraph wire in the night, come up here into northern Wisconsin, where the butternut gleams in the autumn sunshine and the ax-helve has her home. Come where the sky is a dark and glorious blue and the town a magnificent red. Come where the coral cranberry nestles in the green heart of the yielding marsh and the sand-hill crane stands idly on the sedgy brim of the lonely lake through all the long, idle day with his hands in the tail pockets of his tan-colored coat, trying to remember what he did with his handkerchief.
Come up here, S. Q. G. and be my amanuensis. I want a man to go with me on a little private excursion from the Dallas of the St. Croix to the Sault Ste. Marie. I want him to go with me and act as my private secretary and carry my canoe for me. The salary would be small the first year, but you would have a good deal of fun. Most any one can have fun with me. We would go mostly for relaxation and to build up our systems. My system is pretty well built up, but it would be a pleasure to me to watch you build yours up. What I need is a private secretary to go with me and take down little thinklets that I may have thought. You would have nothing to carry but the canoe, a small tent, my gun and a type-writer. I would carry the field glass. I always carry the field glass because something might happen to it. One time an amanuensis who went with me insisted on carrying the field glass, and the second day he lost the cork out of it, so we had to come back and make a new observation before we could start.
You would be welcome, S. Q. G.; welcome here in the fastness of the forest; welcome where the resinous air of the spruce and the tamarack would kiss your wan cheek; welcome to the rocky shores of the grand old fresh water monarch, the champion heavyweight of all the great lakes; welcome to the hazy, lazy days of our long voluptuous autumn, the twilight of the closing year; welcome to the shade of the elms, where the sunshine sneaks in on tiptoe and frolics with the dew and the daisies; welcome to the sombre depths of the ever regretful and repentant pines, whose venerable heads are first to greet the day, and whose heaving bosoms hold the night.
Come over, S. Q. G. Be my stenographer and I will show you where a friend of mine has concealed a watermelon patch in the very heart of his corn-field. Come over and we will show him how concealment, like a worm, may feed upon his damaged fruit. Till then, S. Q. G., ta-ta.
Bill Nye Preparing A Political Speech in Advance for a Time of Need
Sept. 1. – I have just been preparing a speech for to-morrow evening at our convention. It is a good speech and will take well. It is also sincere.
I will give the outlines of the speech here, so that in case I should die or slip up on a stenographer the basis of my remarks may not perish:
Fellow-Citizens: You have seen fit to renominate me for the office which I have held one term already – viz.: member of congress from this district.
As you are aware, I am a self-made man. I have carved out my own career from the ground up, as I may say, till to-day I am your nominee for the second time.
What we want these days is not so much men of marked ability as candidates but available, careful and judicious men. We are too apt to strive for the nomination of brilliant men of pronounced opinions when we must need men who can be easily elected. Of what avail is a man of genius and education and robust brains and earnest convictions if we cannot elect him? He is simply a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.
Therefore, I would say to the youth of America – could they stand before me to-day – do not strive too hard or strain yourselves by endeavoring to attain some object after you are elected to office. Let your earnest convictions remain dormant. Should a man have convictions these days, let him reserve them for use in his own family. They are not necessary in politics. If a member of congress must have a conviction and earnestly feels as though he could not possibly get along another day without it, let him go to the grand jury and make a clean breast of it.
I may say, fellow-citizens, without egotism, that I have been judicious both in the heat of the campaign and in the halls of legislation. I have done nothing that could disrupt the party or weaken our vote in this district. It is better to do nothing than to do things that will be injurious to the interests of the majority.
What do you care, gentlemen, for what I said or did in our great session of last winter so long as I came home to you with a solidified vote for this fall; so long as I have not trodden on the toes of the Irish, the German, the Scandinavian, the prohibitionist, the female-suffragist, the anti-mormon, or the international-copyright crank?
Let us be frank with each other, fellow-citizens. Do you ask me on my return to you how many speeches my private secretary and the public printer attached my name to, or how many packages of fly-blown turnip seed I sent to you during the last two years?
No!!!
You ask yourself how is the vote of our party this fall as compared with two years ago? And I answer that not a vote has been mislaid or a ballot erased.
I have done nothing and said nothing that a carping constituency could get hold of. Though I was never in congress before, old members envied me the long, blank, evasive, and irreproachable record I have made.
No man can say that, even under the stimulating influence of the wine cup, I have given utterance in the last two years to anything that could be distorted into an opinion. And so to-day I come back to you and find my party harmonious, while others return to their homes to be greeted by a disrupted constituency, over whose ruins the ever-alert adversary clambers to success.
So I say to you to-night, Mr. President and gentlemen of the convention, let us leave to the newspapers the expression of what we call earnest convictions – convictions that arise up in after years to belt us across the face and eyes. Let injudicious young men talk about that kind of groceries, but the wary self-made politician who succeeds does not do that way.
It seems odd to me that young men will go on year after year trying to attain distinction by giving utterance to opinions when they can see for themselves that we do not want such men for any place whatever, from juryman to congressman.
If you examine my record for the last session, for instance, you will not find that I spent the day pounding my desk with an autograph album and filling the air with violent utterances pro or con and then sat up nights to get myself interviewed by the disturbing elements of the press. No, sir!
I am not a disturber, a radical or a disrupter!
At Washington I am a healer and at home in my ward I am also a heeler!
What America wants to-day is not so much a larger number of high-browed men who will get up on their hind feet and call on heaven to paralyze their right arms before they will do a wrong act, or ask to have their tongues nailed to the ridge-pole of their mouths rather than utter a false or dangerous doctrine. That was customary when the country was new and infested with bears; when men carried their guns to church with them and drank bay rum as a beverage.
These remarks made good pieces for boys to speak, but they will not do now. What this country needs is a congress about as equally balanced as possible politically, so that when one side walks up and smells of an appropriation the other can growl in a low tone of voice, from December till dog-days. In this way by a pleasing system of postponements, previous questions, points of order, reference to committees, laying on the table, and general oblivion, a great deal may be evaded, and people at home who do not closely read and remember the Congressional Record will not know who was to blame.
Judicious inertness and a gentle air of evasion will do much to prevent party dissension. I have done that way, and I look for the same old majority that we had at the former election.
I often wonder if Daniel Webster would have the nerve to get up and talk as freely about things now as he used to when politics had not reached the present state of perfection. We often hear people ask why we haven't got any Websters in congress now. I can tell you. They are sat down on long before they get that far along. They are not encouraged to say radical things and split up the vote.
I will now close, thanking you for your kind preferment. I will ever strive, while representing you in congress, to retain my following, and never, by word or deed, endeavor to win fame and applause there at the expense of votes at home. I care not to be embalmed in the school speakers and declaimers of future ages, provided my tombstone shall bear upon it the simple, poetic refrain: