Cigars.
“According to General Pleasonton, who collected the tax on them, there were 1,332,246,000 cigars used in the United States last year. This one billion three hundred and thirty-two million two hundred and forty-six thousand cigars were undoubtedly retailed at ten cents apiece. So we smoked up in this country, last year, $133,224,600 worth of tobacco.”
This does not include pipe-smoking nor chewing tobacco.
The total amount of the vile weed produced in the world annually is as follows:—
| Asia, | 309,900,000 | pounds. | |
| Europe, | 281,844,500 | " | |
| America, | 248,280,500 | " | |
| Africa, | 24,300,100 | " | |
| Australia, | 714,000 | " | |
| Making a total of, | 865,039,100 | " |
The mighty Army of Invasion.
It is estimated that there are two hundred millions of tobacco-users in the world. What a splendid regiment of sneezers, spewers, smokers, and spitters they would make! They would form a phalanx of five deep, reaching entirely around the world.
Wouldn’t they look gay? Forty millions, with filthy old tobacco pipes stuck in their mouths, “smoking away ‘like devils!’” Eighty millions, with best Havana cigars, made in Connecticut and New York, from cabbage leaf, waste stumps of cigars, and “old soldiers,” thrown away by Irish, Dutch, Italians, French, and Chinese, out of cancerous mouths, whiskey mouths, syphilitic and ulcerous mouths, rotten-toothed mouths—splendid!—protruding from between their sweet lips! Forty millions with pigtail and fine cut, sweet “honey dew,” made as above, scented, grinding away in their forty million human mills! Forty millions, including five millions in petticoats, holding cartridge boxes (of snuff) in their delicate hands, from which they distribute death-dealing ammunition to—their lovely noses!
See them “marching along, marching along,” to the tune that never an “old cow died on” yet, or hogs, or any animal, except he unfortunately became mixed up involuntarily with viler humans,—with jolly banners, blacked in the smoke and stench of great battles, bearing the words “Death to Purity!” “War to the Hilt with Health!” “All hail, Disease, Drunkenness, and Death!”
Splendid picture!