Evening Republican, Volume 23, Number 148, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 June 1920 — My Lady Nicotine [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

My Lady Nicotine

By JOHN DICKINSON SHERMAN.

m A Y LADY NICOTINE is a most interesting personBJI age. As is frequently the case with ladies with a past, she is more / ZW interesting than those who have only a future. IZ/lv Her present certainly Is a going concern. And her future has added fascination of sufficient mystery to induce considerable speculation. My Lady Nicotine’s influence is not always soothing. Like all great personages she has made enemies. Men began to fight over her a long, long while ago, and only the other day the newspapers told of the first of a possible recurrence of the night raiders’ outrages in Kentucky. Urban VHI and Innocent XI fulminated against her. Sultan Amuret IV decreed death by torture to her devotees. James I of England Issued his “Counterblaste to Tobacco,” in which he denounced her as a creature of the “pit that is bottomless.” Lucy Page Gaston of Anti-Ciga-rette League of America fame is suspected of a desire to shy her bonnet into the presidential ring. Low on the horizon, no bigger than a woman’s hand, is a cloud which rumbles “tobacco next!”

Possibly some of My Lady Nicotine’s famous devotees have loved her for the enemies she has made. Anyway, Spenser wrote of her as “divine.” Byron said “sublime.” Lamb declared his affection thus: For thy sake, tobacco, I Would do anything but die. Bulwer-Lytton wrote this: “The man who smokes thinks like a sage and acts like a Samaritan.” Kipling profoundly reflects that “a woman Is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.” Mark Twain suspects that the ipan who doesn’t smoke loses "an appalling aggregate of happiness.’’ This sort of worshiper clings to the heresy that this is a pretty good old world after all.. He Isn’t worrying about spirit manifestations and Is not concerned over the doctrine of the subliminal soul. He suspects Lucy Page Gaston'of being a spiritual descendant of the Puritans who condemned bearbaiting not so much because It gave pain to the bear as because it gave pleasure to the spectators. “When doctors disagree who shall decide?” The doctors are as divided in their opinion of My Lady Nicotine as are the literary lights. Some see tn her a veritable plague to humanity. Others maintain that she Is rather a benefactor. Of course most physicians hold that smoking is bad for young and growing specimens of the human species. And probably most of them are not prepared to advise that women should smoke. And there are certainly some men who cannot smoke without ill effects —just as there are men who cannot eat strawberries or drink coffee without harm. A cold bath 4n the morning is meat and drink to some men; it would put others under the sod in short prder. Probably the majority of up-to-date medical men are of the opinion that it has yet to be proved that smoking in moderation hurts any normal man. At one extreme of human judgment is that of the man who wrote that a nation which smokes tobacco perishes. At the other is that of the man who predicted in 1918 that America would win the war because it was the heaviest smoker of all the nations. My Lady Nicotine needs no press agent and has no trouble about breaking into print. Some enthusiastic collectors of “Nicotania” have whole libraries about her. There is one— George Arents, Jr., of New York — who is the proud possessor of more than 2,500 books, booklets and pam•phlets devoted wholly or in part to her. These libraries tell pretty much everything about the lady. _ No European ever heard of tobacco until the first week of November, 1492. The commonly accepted version of the story is that two sailors sent by Columbus to explore the Island which he named San Salvador returned with a tale of natives who carried firebrands

whose smoke they inhaled and puffed out of their mouths and noses. Later they discovered that the leaves of a plant were rolled in the leaf of maize. The first clear account of smoking was given in 1526 by Gonzalo Hernandez de Oviedo in his “Historia General de las Indias." He said the practice was pernicious and “used to produce insensibility.” He reported that in Cuba and most of the Islands the natives smoked rolls of herbs, “which they called tobaccos,” while on the mainland they Inhaled through the forks of a Y-shaped hollow cane which they inserted in both nostrils. This instrument the natives called “tobago.” The Spaniards thought the name was that of the fuel instead of the pipe, hence our word tobacco. Oviedo pointed out the mistake, but “tobacco” had worked itself into the white man’s language, and there It stayed. The herb itself was variously known among the natives. It was “cohiba” to the Caribs, “petun” to the Brazilians, “plecelt” to the Mexicans and “uppowoc” to the Indians of Virginia. Nicotine, the active chemical principle of tobacco, is an Intensely poisonous alkaloid, named from Nicot, who introduced tobacco into France as a medicinal plant. Hence, finally, “My Nicotine.” Not essentially new are any of the modern forms of tobacco using. The leaves wrapped about with corn husk roughly correspond to our civilized cigarette; the leaves rolled without wrapping of another material to our cigar. Tobacco was powdered into snuff and taken Into the nostrils, as now. Tobacco was also chewed by various Indian peoples. The pipe was in almost universal use; among the ’American Indians the stone pipe, “calumet,” was a necessary implement in many ceremonial functions. Tobacco arrived in Europe apparently by several different routes and under several different disguises. Probably Sir Walter Raleigh deserves the credit —or blame —of Introducing the smoking of it. Up to his time tobacco had camouflaged as a medicine, the few smokers professing to be smoking for their health. The Englishman—his pipe is shown herewith —blew the smoke from his nose defiantly and said he smoked because he liked it. The antis of the seventeenth century had a high old time, Pagan, Mohammedan and Christian monarchs alike attempted to crush the habit of “tobacco drinking,” as it was then called in England. But despite all opposition tobacco eventually was established as a favorite luxury all over .Europe. The cigarette attained commercial importance ofter the Crimean war. English officers got the habit from association with the Turks, French and Italians, who, like the Indians, “rolled their own.” Other Englishmen imitated this new smart diversion of the army officers. America, which somewhere

along the path of the centuries had almost lost the cigarette, found it again in England, and so it came back to us. For a time most cigarettes were made from the Turkish leaf. Then It was discovered that the "bright” American tobacco, now grown in Virginia, the Carolinas and eastern Tennessee, made an agreeable cigarette. Eventually cigarette making machinery was invented, and today American cigarettes, both “straight” and “blended,” are smoked all over the world. In 1868 not enough cigarettes were consumed In the United States to be subjected to the Internal revenue tax. In recent years the Increase has been by billions. From 1899 to 1914 it was 500 per cent. In the past two years the demand has advanced prodigiously, probably largely because of the war. In 1910, for the first time, the manufacture of cigarettes exceeded that of cigars, their relative numbers being 8,500,000.000 and 8,000.000,000. Since then, while cigarettes have multiplied, cigars have just about' stood still. In the year ended June 30, 1919, the number of cigarettes was 46,500,000,000, and of cigars approximately 8,000,000,000, as in 1910. For the first time more leaf tobacco went into cigarettes than Into cigars, the two numbers being 177,000,000 pounds and 162,000,000 pounds. The government derived from the internal revenue tax on tobacco $206,003,091, an Increase of $49,814,431 over the preceding year. More than $95,500,000 of the tobacco money came from cigarettes. Recently the tobacco tax has been heavily increased. Altogether we used 497.079,92(1 pounds of tobacco last year. We got away with 174,697,408 pounds of plug, pounds of twist, 9,809,225 pounds of finecut, 257,893,440 pounds of smoking tobacco and 37,180,382 pounds of snuff. The value of the tobacco crop to the farmer was estimated last year at $542,547,000. The average price he got for it was 39 cents a pound. He gets more now. More than $1,500,000,000 a year Is the value of tobacco products manufactured in the United States. More than a million and a half acres of land are devoted to the growing of the “weed.” On the manufacturing side the government estimate of the capital invested in 1914 was $303,830,009. which was a low figure even then and is greatly exceeded now. The number of wage earners In manufacture in that year was 178,872, and their annual earnings $77,856,000. ? 'lt Is variously figured that 70 per cent of our adult male population and a third of our total population use tobacco In one form or another. The percapita consumption, counting each man, woman and child. Is seven pounds a year. The average consumption among the tobacco users is twenty pounds. There are, according to one of the compilers of data. 25,000,000 smokers and chewers whose average capacity Is 22 pounds per person, 8,000.000 cigarette smokers each lighting 4,500 cigarettes a year and 5,500.000 cigar smokers each destroying 1,500 cigars.