Query.—What did the old Roman do without a cigar? How idle through the day? How survive his interminable post-coenal potations?—The thought is not our own. It occurs somewhere in De Quincey, we believe. It is one of those self-evident propositions you wonder had not occurred to you before.—What an accessory of luxury the pipe would have been to him who passed the livelong day under the mosaic arches of the Thermoe! The strigiles would have vanished before the meerschaum, had that magic clay then been known. How completely would the hookah and the narghileh have harmonized with the crater, cyathi, and tripods of the triclinium in that portraiture of the "Decadence of Rome" which hangs in the Luxembourg Gallery! Poor fellows! they managed to exist without them.
Though pipes are found carved on very old sculptures in China, and the habit of smoking was long since extensively followed there, according to Pallas, and although certain species of the tobacco-plant, as the Nicotiana rustica, would appear to be indigenous to the country, yet we have the best reason to conclude that America, if not the exclusive home of the herb, was the birthplace of its use by man. The first great explorer of the West found the sensuous natives of Hispaniola rolling up and smoking tobacco-leaves with the same persistent indolence that we recognize in the Cuban of the present day. Rough Cortés saw with surprise the luxurious Aztec composing himself for the siesta in the middle of the day as invariably as his fellow Dons in Castile. But he was amazed that the barbarians had discovered in tobacco a sedative to promote their reveries and compose them to sleep, of which the hidalgos were as yet ignorant, but which they were soon to appropriate with avidity, and to use with equal zest. Humboldt says that it had been cultivated by the people of Orinoco from time immemorial, and was smoked all over America at the time of the Spanish Conquest,—also that it was first discovered by Europeans in Yucatan, in 1520, and was there called Petum. Tobacco, according to the same authority, was taken from the word tabac, the name of an instrument used in the preparation of the herb.
Though Columbus and his immediate followers doubtless brought home specimens of tobacco among the other spoils of the New World, Jean Nicot, ambassador to Portugal from Francis II., first sent the seeds to France, where they were cultivated and used about the year 1560. In honor of its sponsor, Botany has named the plant Nicotiana tabacum, and Chemistry distinguished as Nicotin its active alkaloid. Sir Francis Drake first brought tobacco to England about 1586. It owed the greater part of its early popularity, however, to the praise and practice of Raleigh: his high standing and character would have sufficed to introduce still more novel customs. The weed once inhaled, the habit once acquired, its seductions would not allow it to be easily laid aside; and we accordingly find that royal satire, public odium, and ruinous cost were alike inadequate to restrain its rapidly increasing consumption. Somewhere about the year 1600 or 1601 tobacco was carried to the East, and introduced among the Turks and Persians,—it is not known by whom: the devotion of modern Mussulmans might reasonably ascribe it to Allah himself. It seems almost incredible that the Oriental type of life and character could have existed without tobacco. The pipe seems as inseparable as the Koran from the follower of Mahomet.
Barely three centuries ago, then, the first seeds of the Nicotiana tabacum germinated in European soil: now, who shall count the harvests? Less than three centuries ago, Raleigh attracted a crowd by sitting smoking at his door: now, the humblest bog-trotter of Ireland must be poor indeed who cannot own or borrow a pipe. A little more than a century and a half ago, the import into Great Britain was only one hundred and twenty thousand pounds, and part of that was reëxported: now, the imports reach thirty million pounds, and furnish to government a revenue of twenty millions of dollars,—being an annual tax of three shillings four pence on every soul in the United Kingdom. Nor is the case of England an exceptional one. The tobacco-zone girdles the globe. From the equator, through fifty degrees of latitude, it grows and is consumed on every continent. On every sea it is carried and used by the mariners of every nation. Its incense rises in every clime, as from one vast altar dedicated to its worship,—before which ancient holocausts, the smoke of burnt-offerings in the old Jewish rites, the censers of the Church, and the joss-sticks of the East, must "pale their ineffectual fires." All classes, all ages, in all climates, and in some countries both sexes, use tobacco to dispel heat, to resist cold, to soothe to reverie, or to arouse the brain, according to their national habitations, peculiarities, or habits.
This is not the language of hyperbole. With a partial exception in favor of the hop, tobacco is the sole recognized narcotic of civilization. Opium and hemp, if indulged in, are concealed, by the Western nations: public opinion, public morality, are at war with them. Not so with tobacco, which the majority of civilized men use, and the minority rather deprecate than denounce. We shall avail ourselves of some statistics and computations, which we find ready-calculated, at various sources, to support these assertions. The following are the amounts of tobacco consumed per head in various countries:—
"In Great Britain, 17 ounces per head; in France, 18 1/2 ounces,—three-eighths of this quantity being used in the form of snuff; in Denmark, 70 ounces (4 1/2 lbs.) per head; and in Belgium, 73 1/2 ounces per head;—in New South Wales, where there are no duties, by official returns, 14 pounds per head." We doubt if these quantities much exceed the European average, particularly of Germany and Turkey in Europe. "In some of the States of North America the proportion is much larger, while among Eastern nations, where there are no duties, it is believed to be greater still."
The average for the whole human race of one thousand millions has been reasonably set at seventy ounces per head; which gives a total produce and consumption of tobacco of two millions of tons, or 4,480,000,000 of pounds! "At eight hundred pounds an acre, this would require five and a half million acres of rich land to be kept constantly under tobacco-cultivation."
"The whole amount of wheat consumed by the inhabitants of Great Britain weighs only four and one-third million tons." The reader can draw his own inferences.
The United States are among the largest producers of tobacco, furnishing one-twentieth of the estimated production of the whole world. According to the last census, we raised in 1850 about two hundred million pounds. All the States, with five exceptions,—and two of these are Utah and Minnesota,—shared, in various degrees, in the growth of this great staple. Confining our attention to those which raised a million of pounds and upwards, we find Connecticut and Indiana cited at one million each; Ohio and North Carolina, at ten to twelve millions; Missouri, Tennessee, and Maryland, from seventeen to twenty-one millions; Kentucky and Virginia, about fifty-six million pounds.
Of this gross two hundred million pounds, we export one hundred and twenty-two millions, leaving about seventy-eight millions for home consumption.