Smoking, a Universal Habit.
Smoking goes on in the Philippines everywhere but in church—in the hotel dining-room as soon as coffee is served, and at the theatre or opera while the audience is gathering, and between the acts. Even your cab-driver will offer you a cigar, if he thinks you have none. Spanish women of wealth and rank—grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and nieces sit on the balconies of their beautiful residences in the capital, puffing away at their cigarillos,—a tiny brand made especially for feminine consumption; while in some homes men and women help themselves from the same box.
It is an incongruous sight, and one hostile to the accepted ideas of a splendid type of primitive man, to see in the depths of remote provinces native men and women, young and old, of striking physical proportions, the men nude but for the flimsy breech-clout, smoking away at cigars, cigarettes, and even pipes; and at every possible and impossible angle of incidence.
For cigars and cigarettes have for many years been sold everywhere throughout the colony,—in even the remotest hamlets.
Besides, considerable stimulus has been given to the smoking habit in the wildest provinces by travelers, who, to ingratiate themselves with the half-savage natives of distant provinces, or to keep them from speculating whether one is a Spaniard or not, and thereby arousing their ire, bountifully dispense cigars and cigarettes wherever they go.
And so the dominant and absorbing habit of the Filipinos is to smoke.
Indeed, the common habit of smoking makes it possible to realize the Arabian Nights’ stories of fabulous fortunes made in the Philippines in a short time from the cultivation, preparation, and manufacture of the fragrant leaf.
