These days, every man who has not a few
thousand acres of his own is more or less an
advocate of free trade, and, consequently,
ninety-nine men out of a hundred are strongly
opposed to monopolies. Still, without being a
renegade to the just principles of commercial
freedom, one may be allowed to profess that
there is no rule, however good, but should be
suffered to have exceptions. Postal monopoly
and telegraph monopoly are admitted to be
necessities. A government monopoly of tobacco,
if not defensible on the same ground as
postal and telegraph monopoly, has,
nevertheless, led in France to the good result that
France is the only country in the world where,
for a moderate price, an ordinary man can be
sure of a pipe of good tobacco or an unadulterated
cigar.

Tobacco, like every other human institution,
has its detractors; and a French statistician
of more ingeniousness than good sense
has endeavoured to prove by the help of
figures that the increase in the number of
lunatics in France keeps exact pace with the
increase in the number of smokers. "In
1838," he says, "the profit made by the State
upon the sale of tobacco was thirty millions of
francs, and there were ten thousand madmen
in the land; in 1842 the profits had risen to
eighty millions of francs, and the number of
madmen to fifteen thousand; ten years later,
we find one hundred and twenty millions of
profit and twenty-two thousand madmen; while
in 1862 there were no less than forty-four thousand
madmen, to set off against a profit of one
hundred and eighty millions of francs."

A few words will refute this mode of drawing
conclusions. From the forty-four thousand
insane must be deducted the women, who
form forty-seven per cent (almost half) of
the total; moreover, within the last thirty
years the hideous plague of drunkenness, from
which the French had formerly been almost
exempt, has made rapid strides in France.
The excitable people of the South, living in an
ardent climate, quite unfit for the abuse of
spirituous liquors, have of late years discarded
the light red wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy,
and taken to brandy, gin, beer, and, worst of
all, to absinthe. Here lies the real secret of
the rise in the number of madmen. Four-
fifths of the lunatics of France aro natives of
Gascony, Languedoc, Auvergne, the Dauphiné,
and Guienne; of the rest, those whose lunacy
is not congenital have almost all gone mad
under the distracting effects of the whirlwind
life of gambling, drinking, and enervating
debauchery, of which Paris has become the
hot-bed.

It is useless to dwell upon the other argument
of anti-tobacconists, that there is enough
nicotine in every pure cigar to kill a man out-
right. By the same process of reasoning we
iniuht say that in half a pound of almonds
there is sutlicient prussic acid to destroy a troop
of soldiers; and that with the saffron that
could be extracted from six bath buns, a whole
nursery full of children iniirht be sent to their
graves. It is one thing to swallow the distilled
quintessence of a substance containing
a small quantity of poison; and it is another
to take that poison mixed up with certain
matters which counteract its effects and absorb
its noxious properties. The moderate use of
good tobacco involves no danger. On the contrary,
in cases of nervous excitement, it is excellent
as a sedative; it is excellent, also, as a
remedy for sleeplessness; and its soothing
qualities render it an invaluable solace for men
who, like authors and painters, live in a state
of constant mental excitement.

The Sultan, Amurath the Fourth, who
condemned snuff-takers to death; the Shah of
Persia, Abbas, who cut off their noses;
Innocent the Eighth, who doomed them to
hellfire; and James the First, who wrote an
absurd book against them; were all equally in
the wrong. The remarks that apply to smokers
apply to those who take snuff. Our
grandfathers took snuff every day of their lives
from twenty to ninety, without being the
worse for it. All the great men of the last
century indulged in this harmless—though,
it must be owned, dirty—habit. Napoleon
the First, not to have the trouble of opening a
snuff-box every five minutes, used, when out
campaigning, to keep both waistcoat pockets
continually filled with a pet mixture of his
own. To those who still maintain, in the face
of such facts, that tobacco is hurtful, we have
only to answer, as Voltaire answered, when after
taking coffee all his life, he was told at seventy
that the beverage was a poison: "Perhaps," he
said; "but in that case a very slow one."

But the sine qua non condition in the use of
tobacco is that the tobacco must be good;
here we come back to the point whence we
started—the immense benefit the French
enjoy in smoking no worse tobacco than such
as is prepared in the government manufactories
under special supervision, and is offered
for sale with the State mark.

It was in the year 1811, under the reign of
Napoleon, that the French government first
took the monopoly of tobacco. Previous to
that date, the French smokers possessing but
moderate means had fared as ill as those of
England and the United States do to this day.
But one night, at a ball at the Tuileries, the
Emperor noticed a lady who was covered with
diamonds. He asked his chamberlain who she
was. On being told that her husband was a
tobacco merchant who had made a colossal
fortune within a few years, he at once suspected
that a fortune built up so rapidly could have
no very honest foundation. Ten months afterwards
he signed, in his usual arbitrary way, a
decree which secured to the State the exclusive
right of fabricating and selling tobacco. The
monopoly has been renewed since, every ten
years, by successive legislative bodies. The
present monopoly does not expire until the 1st
of January, 1873, before which time, however,
it will doubtless be renewed. From the 1st of
July, 1811, to the 31st of December, 1867, the
gross receipts of the "Régie," or Government
Tobacco Establishment, were nearly two hundred
and fifty-six million pounds English; the