That keeps his kitchen in a box,
And roast meat in a pipe.”
In Hamburg, 40,000 cigars are smoked daily in a population scarcely amounting to 45,000 adult males. And in London, the consumption must be considerable to furnish, from the profits of retailing, a living to 1566 tobacconists. In England, we may presume that the largest smoker of tobacco must be the Queen, since an immense kiln at the docks, called the Queen’s pipe, is occasionally lighted and primed with hundredweights of tobacco, sea damaged or otherwise spoiled, at the same time blowing a cloud
“Which Turks might envy, Africans adore.”
The total number of cigars consumed in France in 1857 is stated to have been 523,636,000; and the total revenue of the French Government from the tobacco monopoly is estimated at £7,320,000 annually. In Russia the revenue is £7,200,000 annually; and in Austria near £3,000,000. These are large sums to pay for the privilege of puffing.
The Buffalo Democracy estimates the annual consumption of tobacco at 4,000,000,000 of pounds. This is all smoked, chewed, or snuffed. Suppose it all made into cigars 100 to the pound, it would produce 400,000,000,000 of cigars. These cigars, at the usual length, four inches, if joined together, would form one continuous cigar 25,253,520 miles long, which would encircle the earth more than 1000 times. Cut up into equal pieces, 250,000 miles in length, there would be over 1000 cigars which would extend from the centre of the earth to the centre of the moon. Put these cigars into boxes 10 inches long, 4 inches wide, and 3 inches high, 100 to the box, and it would require 4,000,000,000 boxes to contain them. Pile up these boxes in a solid mass, and they would occupy a space of 294,444,444 cubic feet; if piled up 20 feet high, they would cover a farm of 338 acres; and if laid side by side, the boxes would cover nearly 20,000 acres. Allowing this tobacco, in its unmanufactured state, to cost sixpence a pound, and we have 100,000,000 pounds sterling expended yearly upon this weed; at least one-and-a-half times as much more is required to manufacture it into a marketable form, and dispose of it to the consumer. At the very lowest estimate, then, the human family expend every year £250,000,000 in the gratification of an acquired habit, or a crown for every man, woman, and child upon the earth. This sum, the writer calculates, would build 2 railroads round the earth at a cost of £5,000 per mile, or 16 railroads the Atlantic to the Pacific. It would build 100,000 churches, costing £2,500 each, or 1,000,000 dwellings costing £25 each (rather small!) It would employ 1,000,000 of preachers and 1,000,000 of teachers, giving each a salary of £125. It would support 3⅓ millions of young men at college, allowing to each £75 a year for expenses.
What a cloud the “human family” would blow if they had each his share of the 4,000,000,000 pounds dealt out to him in cigars on the morning of the 25th of December, in the year of our Lord, 1860. One feels dubious as to the number who would refuse to take their quota, if there were nothing to pay.
Dr. Dwight Baldwin states, that in 1851, the city of New York spent 3,650,000 dollars for cigars alone, while it only spent 3,102,500 dollars for bread. The Grand Erie Canal, 364 miles long, the longest in the world, with its eighteen aqueducts, and eighty-four locks, was made in six years, at a cost of 7,000,000 dollars. The cigar bill in the city of New York would have paid the whole in two years.
The number of cigar manufactories in America is 1,400, and the number of hands employed in them 7,000 and upwards. The total estimated weekly produce of these manufactories is 17½ millions, and the yearly 840 millions. At 7 dollars per 1,000, these would be worth 5 million dollars, and adding 50 per cent. for jobber and retailer, the total cost to consumers would be 7½ million dollars—add to this the sum paid for imported cigars, 6 million dollars, and we have 13½ million dollars, the value of cigars consumed yearly in the United States, without adding profit to the imported cigars; so that, including the amount expended in tobacco for smoking and chewing, and in snuff, the annual cost of the tobacco consumed yearly, is not less than 30 million dollars or £6,000,000. This is but little more than is realized annually in Great Britain by the excise duty alone on the tobacco consumed at home; but it must be remembered, that in America tobacco is free of the duty of three shillings and twopence per pound, and free of charges for an Atlantic passage, so that the tobacco represented by 6 millions there, would be represented here by at least six times that amount.
Cloudland costs something to keep up its dignity after all, but beauty is seductive, and so is tobacco.