Tobacco, King of Hard Times.
IN its annual trade review the Chicago Inter-Ocean says that "although tobacco is really classed among the luxuries, yet its use has become so general and the habits of smoking and chewing so fixed, that it is considered and treated as a necessity by a large majority of consumers. Hence its sale is less affected by hard times than many other lines of goods, the only class to suffer being fine brands of chewing tobacco and high-priced cigars." By this showing, it appears that the most selfish, offensive, and enervating habit that ever set the brand of filth upon the garments and its stench upon the breath of an enlightened people has risen proudly superior to a general stagnation in business, and made a satisfactory record in the trade of one of the dullest of years. What little stretch of economy was made in the direction of this necessity of civilized existence was not forced upon laboring men, whose outcry of meager wages and lack of employment resounded from one end of the country to the other. No; it was the bosses in the financial world who were forced into retrenchment in tobacco. The year 1885 voiced many a complaint of labor against corporate power, charging that it sought to reduce wages to a point that would deprive the working man of the barest comforts of life; but it seems that all the force of organized capital was not able to take from the laborer the gentle solace of his pipe or the supreme comfort of his quid. Labor strikes abounded; strikes against proposed reduction of wages and strikes for advance; strikes to compel the discharge of objectionable men and strikes because of the discharge of favorites; strikes on railway and street-car lines, and in iron mills and cotton factories; strikes against labor-saving machines and against cheap foreign labor. In the aggregate an enormous amount of wages was lost because unearned, and in hundreds of homes the most abject poverty ruled; but the incense from the tobacco-pipe never ceased to ascend, and the laborer continued to expectorate as freely as when work was plenty and wages were good. Children, we are told, went supperless to bed, and from lack of books and clothing, were unable to accept the proffer of free education, and families suffered for coal; but the pipe was by extra exertion kept warm. Such luxuries as sugar, butter, syrup, and meat had to succumb in many a working man's home to the inexorable demand of hard times; but when it came to the actual necessities, the down-trodden laborer produced his plug and pipe, and was consoled. Not only was the devotee of tobacco—of the cheap grades—not reduced to the dire extremity of want, in conjunction with this prime necessity, but he even, as the records show, scorned economy therein. It was his oppressor, the man of means, perhaps even the odious corporation shark, who was forced to retrench upon quality, and substitute for his luxury of fine-cut the rank plug that is the poor man's solace. Let no one think that the laboring class of this favored country is entirely bereft of comfort, so long as the tobacco sales of a dull financial year report an increase of from 5 to 20 per cent. on all of the cheaper grades. Coal is a luxury, upon which the family can afford, in a financial pinch, to economize. School books can be dispensed with. Clothing can be patched and turned and made to do double duty by deft fingers in the poorest home. Soup-houses can be resorted to if the pinch gets sharp enough; but tobacco reigns through all, king of hard times.—Sel.