Читать книгу The Seven Sisters of Sleep. Popular History of the Seven Prevailing Narcotics of the World онлайн

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What a cloud the “human family” would blow if they had each his share of the 4,000,000,000 pounds dealt out to him in cigars on the morning of the 25th of December, in the year of our Lord, 1860. One feels dubious as to the number who would refuse to take their quota, if there were nothing to pay.

Dr. Dwight Baldwin states, that in 1851, the city of New York spent 3,650,000 dollars for cigars alone, while it only spent 3,102,500 dollars for bread. The Grand Erie Canal, 364 miles long, the longest in the world, with its eighteen aqueducts, and eighty-four locks, was made in six years, at a cost of 7,000,000 dollars. The cigar bill in the city of New York would have paid the whole in two years.

The number of cigar manufactories in America is 1,400, and the number of hands employed in them 7,000 and upwards. The total estimated weekly produce of these manufactories is 17½ millions, and the yearly 840 millions. At 7 dollars per 1,000, these would be worth 5 million dollars, and adding 50 per cent. for jobber and retailer, the total cost to consumers would be 7½ million dollars—add to this the sum paid for imported cigars, 6 million dollars, and we have 13½ million dollars, the value of cigars consumed yearly in the United States, without adding profit to the imported cigars; so that, including the amount expended in tobacco for smoking and chewing, and in snuff, the annual cost of the tobacco consumed yearly, is not less than 30 million dollars or £6,000,000. This is but little more than is realized annually in Great Britain by the excise duty alone on the tobacco consumed at home; but it must be remembered, that in America tobacco is free of the duty of three shillings and twopence per pound, and free of charges for an Atlantic passage, so that the tobacco represented by 6 millions there, would be represented here by at least six times that amount.