The man of medicine did so, and reported nothing there. "Strange! Look
again. Why, sir, I have blown ten thousand dollars--a great tobacco
plantation and a score of slaves--through that nose." The Partido cigar
regularly retails at from twenty-five to thirty cents each. An ordinary
smoker will smoke four cigars a day. Three hundred and sixty-five
dollars a year, besides his treating. A small fortune every ten years! A
neighbor of ours on the farm used to go to town in the spring and buy
enough chewing tobacco to last him until after harvest, and flour to last
the family for two weeks. Among all classes of people this useless drain
of the pocketbook is increasing. In our country last year more money was
spent for tobacco than was spent for foreign missions, for the Churches,
and for public education, all combined. Our tobacco bill in one year
costs our Nation more than our furniture and our boots and shoes; more
than our flour and our silk goods; one hundred and forty-five million
dollars more than all our printing and publishing; one hundred and
thirty-five million dollars more than the sawed lumber of the Nation.
Each year France buys of us twenty-nine million pounds of tobacco,
Great Britain fifty millions, and Germany sixty-nine million pounds, to
say nothing of how much these nations import from other countries.
Never before has the use of tobacco been so widespread as to-day. "The
Turks and Persians are the greatest smokers in the world. In India all
classes and both sexes smoke; in China the practice--perhaps there more
ancient--is universal, and girls from the age of eight or nine wear as an
appendage to their dress a small silken pocket to hold tobacco and a
pipe." Nor can the expense and widespread use of tobacco be defended on
the ground that it is a luxury, for the abstainer from tobacco counts it the
greater luxury not to use it. The only explanation for its use is, that it is a
habit which binds one hand and foot, and from which no person with
ordinary will power in his own strength can free himself.