Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 1, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 September 1883 — BAD CIGARS SMOKED. [ARTICLE]

BAD CIGARS SMOKED.

Sow Good Men Will Puff Vile Tobacco and I Enjoy It, [From the Cleveland Herald.] “It’s a great business is the manufacture of cigars,” the cigar dealer went on. “You’ll make your hit shoner or later, and after that the rest is easy. Probably eight men out of ten smoke, and six out of this eight are as unable to select a good cigar as a monkey is to refuse a chestnut. A vast proportion of smokers buy cheap cigars. Many do so from necessity, jthough not a few prefer the tank flavor and the taste of the composite" that is sold for a nickel to the choicest imported. I know of a number of wealthy men in town who smoke ‘5-centertf.’ The stronger and ranker the/ are the more they are to their liking, apparently. I have seen men who are scrupulously careful about what they' eat and drink, requiring the best cooking and, choicest liquors, puffing away at vile rolls of a little tobacco, and much that is miscellaneous, with positive enjoyment. They want to taste the smoke, they say, and they do. There is a high-salaried army officer at the Palmer House, two Judges, the owner of a great corporation on the West Side, a large wholesale merchant, • a retired real-estate millionaire, who constitute fair examples of a class who turh from the delicate cigar of Cuba to the black, sticky articles made in reeking lodging-houses in the purlieus of the city. It’s a peculiar and an anomalous trait in the character of men refined in other respects.” (“What are cheap cigars made of?” “Ask what does not enter into their camposition, and I can name a few articles that are too bulky. But, perhaps, I would be wrong. They may be part of the nickel cigar after ail. I cut one open the other day. In it I found a rusty tack, two long straws, a piece of cotton cloth, some mud and the balance of the filling I conjecture was tobacco. It sjselled like it, but it was dirtier and more broken up than any tobacco I have ever seen except that which exists in the stub a man throws away as worthless.” “Are stubs collected?” -. “Of course they are. It’s no tradition. It’s an open practice in the East, and if you watch the streets closely you will see small boys gather up the fling-away cigars fnom the gutter. Competition is too strong. It forces adulteration into the trade. You may put it down as a fact that the nickel cigar, Which is wholesaled for about one-fifth of that price, is a fraud. Often the cover is nothing more than paper. Seldom is it better than cheap Connecticut or Wisconsin waste leaves. And the filling—go into the shops and see the rubbish and dirt that are piled in heaps with waste cuttings of weak leaves, the fragments and odds and ends collected from every source, including the gutter —see this mess rapidly rolled into cylinders, and these put on the market, and you’ll wonder, as I do, that there are many human constitutions strong enough to stand them.”