This was a double hit, as it reminded me of my Protestant aversion to incense in churches, and also of the fact that the weed and the habit of using it came from my part of the world.
By this time the compartment was so densely filled with smoke that I opened the window and put out my head for breath, as a signal of distress, in the hope, but vain, of enlisting the sympathies of the smokers, and inducing them to forego their pleasures while I recovered. I detected grim smiles of satisfaction on the dark faces of my fellow-travellers, who puffed away the more vigorously, as they looked on my woe-begone face.
Perhaps by advertising a reward for the discovery, it might be possible to find a man in Spain who does not smoke. Yet, strange to say, the culture of tobacco in Spain is forbidden by law. The soil and climate are favorable, and its cultivation has been a great success. But by that kind of legislation or decree peculiar to Spain, and constantly reminding one of the Chinese, the mother country, Spain, is prohibited from raising tobacco in order that the daughter, Cuba, may have the monopoly. The right of importation is sold to contractors, who make a great business of it. In the middle of the fifteenth century the Spaniards began to get tobacco from America, and they have been getting more and more of it ever since. In 1860 they smoked seven millions of cigars, and cigars are not the thing they usually smoke. They have their tobacco rolled up in little bits of paper, and these they carry in their pockets, with matches. Often they carry the tobacco and the paper separately, and make a cigarette when they want it, making one while smoking another. These interesting manufactures are not peculiar to Spain; they are common in our own country, but not so general. The weed is used only for smoking and snuffing in Spain. I cannot learn that it is chewed at all.
Children smoke at an earlier age in Spain than in other countries. It is not uncommon for them to begin at six, or even five years of age. And they never leave it off till they die. Ladies smoke. Not often do we see them with a cigarette in their pretty mouths on the street or in the cars, but in the café and in the drawing-room they enjoy it, as well as in the boudoir and the bath. By cool fountains, in a marble-paved patio, among the orange-trees, or lolling at noon on their silken-hung couches, they love to smoke, and their lords have spoiled their own breaths and taste too effectually to make any objection. Where both eat garlic it amounts to the same thing.
In Seville we saw a tobacco factory, erected more than a hundred years ago, at a cost of nearly two millions of dollars then! It is 652 feet long and 524 feet wide. Five thousand persons are at work in it all the time, putting the imported tobacco into cigars or cigarettes, and making snuff, and they use two millions of pounds of tobacco every year. Most of these workers are women. Mothers who bring their children have nursery arrangements provided for them during the hours of work. But the most of them are young women, a class by themselves, known as cigareras, or cigar-girls. Smart at their business in the factory, they are wild as hawks and gay as larks at the bull-fight on Sundays, or the dance on the green. This is the largest establishment of the kind in Spain, and produces as good an article as any other, but the cigars made in Spain are not as popular with good judges as those brought directly from Cuba. The manufacturers there prefer sending the best to London, New York, or Paris, where they find a readier market for the high-priced article. And the Cubans are as cute in concocting peculiar flavors for their cigars, as the French or the Italians for their wines, or Jerseymen for their cider. The connoisseur in tobacco pays a quarter of a dollar (more or less) for a “first-rate” cigar, and smokes it with delicious enjoyment at his club, or after dinner in his study, rejoicing in the dreamy, balmy languor that softly steals upon his senses, soothes his nerves, and makes him sweetly oblivious of the cares and toils of the day just passed. He is sure it does him good. And he does not know, and will not believe when he is told, what every one knows who looks into the subject to learn, that at the very root and source of the business there is as much concoction of tobacco as there is of coffee or wine. Potash and soda are in abundant use to impart peculiar pungency to the plant. And many in the excited atmosphere of New York or London life demand a sedative cigar more soporific than the narcotic plant in its natural state. For them, cigars are made of tobacco leaves steeped in opium. Many of our clergymen, renowned for eloquence and piety and learning, denounce with blazing zeal the baneful practice of smoking or chewing opium, a habit becoming almost as common in the United States as in China. But these same excellent men are daily smoking opium in their cigars, quite unconscious of the evils, physical and mental, they are gradually but surely inhaling with every breath they draw through this venomous weed. The cigar burns freely when first lighted, its ashes are grayish white, and the ring is faint at the end, the smoke rises lightly, and the taste, if any, is nearly imperceptible; therefore they know it is a good cigar. But the opium-eater is not more surely a suicide than they. Dyspepsia often follows; and nervous debility, despondency, melancholy, insomnia, maladies supposed to be relieved by what is their producing cause. Epilepsy and apoplexy are not unknown effects.
We now cross the wide pastoral regions of La Mancha. Readers of Don Quixote recollect these plains as the scene of many a gallant exploit by the knight-errant who took his title from this province. And we had no sooner called him to mind than we saw a windmill, and then another, and soon many more, brandishing their huge arms, as when the crazy hero supposed them to be challenging him to fight, and with mad courage rushed to the encounter. Flocks of sheep are roaming over the plains as when he mistook them for hostile armies. His trusty squire Sancho proposed that they should wait until they saw which side was likely to come off conqueror, and join that; but the hero of the windmill denounced the counsel as worthy only of a craven, insisting it would be more becoming a valiant knight to join the weaker side, and insure it the victory.
No trees are seen. This is the peculiar feature of the Spanish landscape. Across vast plains that reach the horizon the eye seeks in vain to find a single tree to relieve the monotony of the view. And when the hills stretch away in graceful lines, bending and rising with voluptuous swells that seem to be carved and set against the sky, they are destitute of trees. In centuries past these have been stripped off, and none have been planted since; and the country is as bare as the back of your hand.
The sheep are tended by shepherds, who migrate from the higher to the lower pastures, according to the season of the year. They constitute a large part of the wealth of the people. Ten years ago there were seventeen millions of sheep in Spain. The number is, doubtless, much greater now. The wool trade of Spain was at one time of vast importance to the world, but England and Germany now far outstrip it, and the trade with Syria, in the coarser wools, has opened an outlet for the produce of Lebanon and the plains of Mesopotamia.
Corn, including cereals of all kinds, does well in this central part of Spain. It thrives in spite of the stupidest, or rather the most primitive style of agriculture, still prevailing. “Tickle the ground with a hoe,” and the crop will spring. But there is little tickling done with a hoe. They plough to this day with a tree, the root sticking into the ground and scratching it a little; or they leave a branch shooting out at an angle from the stem of the tree, and sometimes they cover this stick with a bit of iron, and with mules or oxen drag it along the field. They sow broadcast, and plough it under. They use no harrows. It is barely possible that one of the modern civilized ploughs has found its way into Spain, but I saw none, and heard of nothing better than the but-end of a small elm-tree. Yet agriculture is the great business of Spain, suited to the habits and genius of the people, who love the sun and enjoy the open air, and dislike trade or mechanics of any kind. And more than any other people in Europe the Spanish do as their fathers did, despising all innovations as unworthy of their ancestral dignity. The farmers of Virgil and Homer, and the rural scenes which are described in the Old Testament Scriptures, are the counterpart of what may be seen in Spain to-day. I am reminded daily of the fields in Asia Minor, in Syria, and Greece. If it were strange that improvements in husbandry had made very little progress there, much more surprising it is to find that all things in this country continue to be as they were. They are so near the rest of the world, and the means of communication are now so ready, it is a marvel of marvels that they are still in the same ruts their fathers were in a thousand years ago.
But there are signs of better times. The law of primogeniture has been abolished, and this new measure tends rapidly to the multiplication of owners of real estate. The lands of the church have been sold and divided. Vast tracts held by the crown have also been distributed by law among the people, at a moderate price. Agricultural societies have been formed, and cattle shows and fairs are becoming common. These things are in the right direction. The government has established agricultural schools and model farms. A few periodicals are published, with the intent of spreading useful information among the people; and those who can read will get some good out of them.