Tobacco's World Triumph 55 



Anglo-Saxon countries that women, and, to a large 

 extent, children, do not smoke. The abstinence of 

 women, indeed, is one of the strangest anomalies of 

 custom. 



Fourier declared that ' the nation that smokes 

 perishes.' Were this true, the whole world would be 

 hastening to ruin and devastation, since all races, 

 nations, and tribes smoke. For a perishing nation 

 Holland, smoking 7 pounds of tobacco per head of 

 the population per annum, is not a bad example of 

 national prosperity and sturdiness. Balzac, in his 

 essay on ' Modern Stimulants,' foretold the downfall 

 of Germany from its addiction to tobacco. To-day, 

 smoking more than ever, Germany is united and 

 more prosperous than she has ever been before. 



Than tobacco there is nothing more universal. 

 The taste for it is world-wide. Salt, a necessary of 

 life, can alone compare with tobacco, really and 

 theoretically a luxury, though Locke classed it with 

 bread in its universality. There is, indeed, a strange 

 likeness between salt and tobacco. The king and 

 the humblest beggar, the sage and the fool, must take 

 salt to live ; in each it preserves the spark of life. So 

 is it with tobacco ; it soothes and helps the life of the 

 navvy and the aristocrat, of the savage African and 

 the cultured philosopher. Whether it be in the 

 coarse shag or half-guinea Havana the effect is the 

 same ; the miner sucking thick twist out of a short black 

 pipe does not enjoy it less than his noble employer 

 precisely puffing a costly cigar in a gold-mounted 

 holder. Whether in roughest cut-cake or finest 

 Shiraz, in smutty clay, rich meerschaum or the 



