The Spitting Habit

1895

It Is a Menace to the Health of Man, Woman and Child.

There is hardly anything new that can be said to the spitting part of the community to cure this very bad habit. Signs have been placed in cars positively forbidding the act, yet in these same vehicles a woman has to carefully select her seat in order to save the cleanliness of her skirts. Women's clubs have aired the matter freely. Newspapers have devoted columns to condemnation of the vile habit, yet one has only to walk a square in a popular neighborhood to see how vain has been all this hue and cry and how indifferent the male portion of the town is to a clean and orderly civic housekeeping, for a cleanliness of a city is but the cleanliness of the home extended beyond the front door, and there is no more reason why a man should make a public walk distasteful to hundreds of people than that he should disturb the members of his family by using vilely the hallways and floors of his home.

In the house, for throat and mouth that must be relieved, a proper place or receptacle is provided, and the man who would attempt to neglect their use would surely hear sharply from the head of the house. So in our civic home the proper place for spitting is surely not on the sidewalk, and the man who neglects to step to the curb at such times should hear very sharply from those who represent our civic head. Perhaps the weakness of this reform is that the evil has always been regarded as affecting the happiness of only a part of the community — the women — but if it could be emphasized, what is so clearly a truth, that this spitting habit is a direct and easy medium for the spread of diseases, thus affecting the welfare of the whole community, the offenders may take some thought of the matter. The secretion of thousands of throats, drying where it lays and throwing off the germs of the bronchial and other diseases which cause them, fill the very atmosphere with danger, and every mouth and nostril that passes by runs the gantlet of danger. That fact, though a true one, gives rise to uncomfortable thoughts, but the subject itself is a most uncomfortable one, and the sooner the cause for all this discomfort and uneasiness is removed the better for all, not only for the woman and her skirt braids, but for the health of the man, woman and child. — Philadelphia Press.