PLANTS AROUND VERA CRUZ. 343 
off in the English government steamers) ; consequently they 
must either proceed to Laguna to buy log-wood, or they must 
take in sugar, coffee, or tobacco, in a Cuban or Haytian port. 
As soon as tobacco becomes an export article, its cultivation 
must increase immensely in the Coast States, the Mexican 
being very partial to this branch of agriculture, which occu- 
pies him part of the year only.” 
Mayer also alludes as follows to the same subject :— 
“A large portion of the tobacco sold in the republic is 
contraband; for the ridiculous and greedy restrictions and 
exactions with which a plant of such universal consumption 
is surrounded, necessarily disposes the people to violate laws 
which they feel were only made‘to impair their rights of 
roduction and trade under a constitution professing to be 
ree. 
The government planters in the State of Vera Cruz have 
large, fine plantations, and the plants are carefully tended 
and cultivated as in all countries where tobacco is a govern- 
ment monopoly. On each plant a certain number of leaves 
are taken off, including the sand leaf, which is thrown away, 
and everything in the way of topping and suckering performed 
as carefully as on the tobacco farms in Cuba. The small 
farmers who raise only a few thousand plants are not as 
careful as the large planters, and are sometimes guilty of 
planting more than the number agreed upon, while the 
mountain passes towards the table-land are carefully guarded 
‘to prevent smuggling of the crop, which is far more remu- 
nerative than selling to the government. 
We will now take the reader to the primitive tobacco 
plantations of America about the middle of the Sixteenth 
Century. The plantations were not located in Cuba as many 
have supposed but what has been variously named Hispanio- 
la, Hayti, and St. Domingo. It was in this island that the 
Spaniards first began the cultivation of tobacco and inaugu- 
rated (under the guise of Christianity) that career of 
monstrous cruelty, with which their insatiable appetite for 
the burning of heretics and for the baiting of bulls so well 
accords. In 1509, Diego Columbus, the eldest son of the great 
discoverer, assumed in St. Domingo, or as it was then called, 
