TOBACCO STATISTICS

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Nov 10, 1881

TOBACCO STATISTICS.

CIGAR MANUFACTORIES, ETC.

SOME people talk a great deal about ministers and the cost of keeping them, paying their house rent, table expenses, and other items of salary. Did such croakers ever think that it costs $35,000,000 to pay the salary of American lawyers, that $12,000,000 are paid out annually to keep our criminals, and $10,000,000 to keep the dogs in the midst of us alive, while only $6,000,000 are spent annually to keep the thousands of preachers in the United States? These are facts, and statistics will show them to be facts. What one thing exerts such a mighty influence in keeping the Republic from falling to pieces and the nation from becoming like Sodom and Gomorrah, as the Bible and ministers? Skeptic—croaker—tell us?

The number of cigars sold on Broadway, New York, is estimated at 20,000 daily. Of these, one-twentieth part cost thirty cents, one-fifth twenty-five cents, two-fifths fifteen cents, and three-twentieths ten cents. Thus Broadway spends upon its cigars $3,300 per day, or $2,050,850 per year. It is estimated that in the city of New York 75,000,000 cigars are consumed yearly, the total cost of which is $9,650,000. Add to this the amount annually expended for pipes and tobacco, and we have an aggregate of ten and a half millions as New York's yearly account with retailers of the weed. The 75,000,000 cigars if laid end to end, would extend one and a half times across the Atlantic, or, if laid side by side, would build quite a wall of cigars from New York to Albany.

In the manufacture of the article there are 946 firms engaged. These firms are in so many instances unworthy of credit, that the government, in order to secure the fulfillment of the provisions of the law, requires of them penal bonds, which at present amount to $7,947,000. There are some 4,000 machines, such as cutters, presses, snuff-mills, etc. The State which has the most of the manufactories of that filth is North Carolina, the number being 191; Virginia follows, with 178. The number of persons engaged in manufacturing cigars is 10,827, and they give bonds in the sum of $21,374,000. The minimum of a cigar manufacturer's bond is $500, with an additional sum of $100 for every registered cigar-maker employed. Of these, New York has 2,896; Pennsylvania, 2,543; Illinois, 553; Maryland, 327.

The gratification of our depraved appetites costs a far larger sum than would support all our poor-houses, feed and clothe our poor, fill the treasuries of our great Christian missionary societies, and carry on all our schemes of education. It is a little thing, seemingly, but the aggregate is fearful to contemplate.

We have pauper families, it has been ascertained, which have spent more than a thousand dollars on tobacco, counting principal and interest. We have genteel clerks who spend annually from one to five hundred dollars on cigars. We have a chief magistrate who, on a late back trip from Boston to New York, with his suite, smoked a hundred dollars' worth of cigars. Who pays this bill? Do Boston gentlemen pay it, or the State of Massachusetts? Can we reverence a smoking volcano as chief magistrate?—Tract.