Cigar Manufacture in New York
A CONTRIBUTOR to the Tribune furnishes that paper some information about the manufacture of cigars in New York, which can hardly be agreeable reading for smokers. Five-eighths of all the cigars that are sold in New York City, he states, are made in east-side tenements by Bohemian families, who perform all the various processes of manufacture in their dirty rooms, where they not only work but also eat and sleep. The tobacco is wet down and spread upon the floor overnight, and is trodden upon meanwhile by the family in the pursuit of their domestic operations. In the morning, while it is yet damp and soiled, it is stripped from the stems by the children, while the women make the fillers, and the men of the family roll and trim the cigars, turning out seven hundred in a day, which are duly branded with some high-sounding Spanish name and sold for an imported article. And the children who aid in the manufacture of these bundles of filth, are kept steadily at work for fourteen hours a day. They are more to be pitied than the people who willingly smoke the cigars, for they cannot help themselves.