"Base, Hurtful Corruption" That Built Many Palaces

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 11, 28 January 1937, Page 9

"Base, Hurtful Corruption" That Built Many Palaces

Tobacco's Astonishing Rise to Popularity

CONSIDER the astonishing story of tohacco. It is a new thing in the world, since it is only in the last four hundred years that smoking has been practised by civilised peoples (says a writer in the News Chronicle) . It is a weed (nicotiana), this tobacco, and no one has ever been able to prove either that it does any good or that it does any harm. It is neither meat nor drink, and it is not at all a necessity. Yet in the four hundred years it has made itself into one of the greatest commodities of the whole world. News of tobacco was brought to Europe by Columbus, who had been astonished to see American Indians with lighted leaves in their mouths. The Indians so reverenced their tobacco, it appeared, that they offered • it to their gods, who, they believed, also smoked, and even cast it on the angry waves to quell storms. Seamen Begin It. A little later Transatlantic mariners learned the strange habit them&elves. Portuguese sailors, men of Hawkins, Drake and Raleigh, all began to smoke. Astonished crowds saw Londdn's first. smokers, roistering 1 sea captains, in the streets of 1565. Raleigh himself, undaunted by the bucket of water his gardener threw over ' him, took up smoking and smoked all his life till, in the end it is said, he went to his death on the scaffold with a pipe in his mouth. Queen Elizabeth tried a few whiffs, and by the end of her reign the habit was fairly general in England. Then James I. came to the Throne. He was one of the most militant anti-smokers in history — a man whom Nicotine's fascination utterly escaped, who called it simply "a stink." The King saw with dismay the new vast army of tobacco addicts, nay, even the professors who were making a living by teaching the art from the beginning right up to the smoke-ring-blowing stage. James set out conscientiously to stem the tide. He began with a pamphlet written by his own hand. "There cannot," he wrote, "be a more base and yet hurtful corruption in a countrey . . . Shall we without blushing abase ourselves so farre as to imitate these beastly Indians? . . . Why do we not as well imitate in walking naked?" . He tried to increase the duty, but .Parliament, would not let him. He tried to stop the growth of the plant in England. When he went to Cambridge it was ordered that no undergraduate or; college servant should enter a tobacconist's during his stay. When he denounced smoking at • Oxford a courageous Oxford doctor, Chey-

, nell, ascended the tribuhe, pipe in hand, and flatly contradicted what he had said. James's efforts were of no avail. His subjects defied him and, indeed, he lived to see even the ploughmen smoking their clay pipes as they walked the furrow. , Meanwhile all the rest of Europe was falling under the weed's influence in spite of every attempt to prevent it. It was seen in Holland first; then it crossed the Rhine into Central Europe. Curiously enough, every war that broke out resulted in spreading it. The Thirty. Years' War (1618-1648) saw it brought into Germany by Spanish soldiers. The authorities everyr wh^re regarded it much as drug-taking is * regarded to-day. Edict after. edict appeared in Switzerland. Threats that no innkeeper should be allowed to supply smokers with meat and drink, banishment to the chain gang, brandings, beating with rods, fines— none of these things deterred the Swiss smokers, not even the women, who were already numbered among the , tobacco devotees. In 1693 the town sergeant of Berlin was directed to biirn all tobacco and break all pipes he found. Even the clergy caused scandal bjf smoking at church. Forbidden in Peru. In Spanish-American Peru a decrce was passed by which a celebrant of Mass was forbidden under pakf of everlasting dam- - nation to use tobacco in any form whatever. The scandal of the chapiain, priest, and deacon all smoking during Mass at Seville resulted somewhajt later in a Bull threatening offenders with ex-communica-tion. Persons smoked in church. It was even necessary to forbid smoking in St. Peter's. Most savage of all was the smokers' persecution in Russia. The Tsars exiled smokers and tobacco-sellers ' to Siberia, established a special court for their punishment, and imposed merciless floggings with the knout, and slitting of the nostrils and lips— in vain. Then, with matters at their worst, came a strange reformation. At last the rulers saw that nothing would stop the smoker from filling his pipe. They also saw how great was the tobacco trade. "Our subjects smoking may be wicked," they reasoned, "but at least it shall be made profitable to us." It was an Italian ruler, the Duke of Mantua, who first hit on the idea that was to spread all over Europe. He sold the exclusive right to trade in tobacco in his dominion to a concessionaire for 16,900 lire. Tobacco monopolies were clearly a fine idea. Savoy, Venice and Lombardy eagerly sold their monopolies; France, Silesia, Bohemia and Tyrol followed. The Pope

himself sold the monopoly for his dominions to the Jews of Ferrara. Millions flowed into the royal coffers everywhere. A new gold mine had opened up for kings. The ban on tobacco was quickly raised all over Europe. Potentates who had been doing everything they could to make smoking as uncomfortable as possible now did all in their power to encourage smokihg, until (to anticipate) the glorious climax in the year ^1851, when the Papal States actually punished by imprisonment anyone who distributed anti-smoking literature. With the monopolies tobacco began to play a great part in history. The enriched kings built their palaces, their armies, and made their uniforms ever more splendid with the aid of the tobacco revenue. England (though not a monopoly country) was able to afford her Glorious Revolution of 1688 because she pledged the nation's tobacco revenue to the Dutch Government to pay the expenses of William of Orange's expedition. It was in the reign of Queen Victoria (who also could not bear the smell of smoke) that an event occurred which made all tobacco's former popularity seem insigniflcant. This was the introduction of the cigarette. Cigarettes originated in South America in the eighteenth century. SpanishAmericahs brought them to Spain. They first appeared in France in 1844. They were helped on their way by the perfection of matches by a G'erman called I. F. Kamerer, an unfortunate chemistry student, who died in an asylum in 1857, after enduring severe punishments "for making dangerous contrivances." Smoking and Great War. The Great War led to an enormous increase of smoking. The staffs of the various armies did their utmost to procure tobacco for their men, because of the sedative value they believed it possessed. General Pershing even cabled to the United States Government: "Tobacco is as indispensable as the daily ration; we must have thousands of tons of it without delay." The world's tobacco trade increased by 66 per cent. between 1914 and the present day. The output of cigarettes in America, which was 15,000,000,000 a year before the war, is now more than 100,000,000,000, or 80 a head a year. Britons smoke even more than Afiiericans— 81.1 a head a year; and £70,000,000, or almost one-tenth of the entire annual revenue of the British Isles from all sources is drawn "from the tobacco duty.