Smoking in America.

Te Aroha News, Volume II, Issue 83, 3 January 1885, Page 5

Smoking in America.

While the practice of smoking, notwithstanding parental vigilance, the warnings of a large proportion of the faculty, and tho well-meant efforts of Anti-Tobacco Associations, has made gigantic strides in Great Britain, a corresponding development of the usage has taken place in the United States, where, according to some interesting statistics lately published, there were manufactured, in the year 1883, no fewer than three thousand and seven millions four hundred and ninety-four thousand and thirty-seven cigars, in addition to six hundred and forty millions of cigarettes, yielding to the revenue a total of nearly eighteen millions of dollars in taxation. As for the cigars, the bulk of these products are of the kind known as " domestics," and, albeit made of genuine tobacco, are not so skilfully manufactured as, with a few exceptions, to suit the taste of the European, the Cuban, or the South American smoker. In the States, again, the affluent, in the face of a protective tariff of the most afflictive order, demand the choicest of Havana cigars. A modest "Londres" of an approved Havana brand is held in New York or Boston or in Chicago to be cheap at twenty-five cents, or one shilling sterling while in San Francisco as much as half or three-quarters of a dollar will be given without much murmuring fora "Regalia Britannica. It is in the article of cigarettes that the expansion of the American home trade in manufactured tobacco has been most remarkable. Eight years ago only eight millions of cigarettes were manufactured in the States ; and even this insignificant aggregate was an increase of more than three hundred per cent, over the amount manufactured in any former year. last year tho total number of cigarettes manufactured had risen to the colossal figure of six hundred and forty millions. Of this number only forty millions were exported, so that the enormous quantity of six hundred millions remained for home consumption. As regards the number of cigarettes importedjinto the United States, it is comparatively small, and is said to be annually diminishing- It would be exceeding difficult to apportion these six hundred millions of cigarettes among the classes most likely to smoke them ; foralthough in the Southern States of the Union the negresses frequently smoke, the white female population are universally abstainers from the weed. The American ladies are, as a rule, fiercely intolerant of smoking, which carried on in their presence is considered to be an outrage on decorum. An immense proportion of tho population of the United States must thus be at once set down as nonconsumers of cigarettes, or, indeed, of tobacco in any shape or form. Inquiry is baffled as to the number of American citizens who contrive to use up six hundred millions of cigarettes in the course of a year, simply because it is altogether impossible to ascertain at what age the American boy begins to smoke.

The modern Jack Homer's Christmas philosophy :— " Always pass the fruit to everybody else before helping yourself. Common politeness will induce your company to leave the choicest specimens upon the plate, when you can eat them without exciting remark." Sir Henry Parkes, foiled in getting Mr Webb, of the " Campbelltown Herald," convicted of publishing a criminal libel, has served that gentleman with a writ, claiming £10,000 damages, for litfekv Meanwhile Mr Webb is being fdted and lionised, and public