CRUELTY TO SMOKERS. 213 



breathes forth again to soothe his pain and to vanquish fatigue 

 and anxiety. 



" In the early times of the introduction of tobacco, smokers 

 in many countries were condemned to infamous and cruel 

 punishments ; had their noses and their lips cut off, and with 

 blackened faces and mounted on an ass, exposed to the 

 coarse jests of the vilest vagabonds and the insults of .the 

 multitude. But now the hangman smokes, and the criminal 

 condemned to death smokes before being hanged. The king 

 in his gilt coach smokes ; and the assassin smokes who lies in 

 wait to throw down before the feet of the horses the murder- 

 ous bomb. The human family spends every year two thou- 

 sand six hundred and seventy millions of francs (about a 

 hundred millions in English money) on tobacco, which is not 

 food, which is not drink, and without which it contrived to 

 live for a long succession of ages. 



" In the discomfitures and disasters which befell the Army 

 of Lavalle, in the civil wars of the Argentine Republic, the 

 poor fugitives had to suffer the most horrible privations, 

 which can be imagined. By degrees the tobacco came to an 

 end, and the Argentines smoked dry leaves. One man, more 

 fortunate than his comrades, continued to use with much 

 economy the most precious of all his stores tobacco. A fel- 

 low soldier begged to be allowed to put the economist's pipe 

 in his own mouth, and thus to inhale at second-hand the 

 adored smoke, paying two dollars for the privilege. What is 

 more striking still, when, in 1843, the convicts in the prison 

 of Epinal, France, who had for some time been deprived of 

 tobacco, rose in revolt, their cry was 4 tobacco or death ! ' 

 When Col. Seybourg was marching in the interior of Suri- 

 nam against negro rebels, and the soldiers had to bear the 

 most awful hardships, they smoked paper, they chewed leaves 

 and leather, and found the lack of tobacco the greatest of all 

 their trials and torments." 



Elsewhere, inquiring what nervous aliments harmonize the 

 one with the other, he says : 



" The only, the true, the legitimate companion of coffee is 

 the nicotian plant; and wisely and well the Turkish epicures 

 declare that for coffee the drink of Heaven tobacco is the 

 salt. The smoke of a puro, of a manilla, or of real Turkish 

 tobacco, which passes amorously through the voluptuous tip 

 of amber, blends magnificently with the austere aroma of 

 the coffee, and the inebriated palate is agitated between a 

 caress and a rebuke." 



