[Preferability of discarded cloth.] It must not be overlooked that, in the manufacture of paper, worn linen and cotton rags are the very best materials that can be employed, and make the best paper.  Moreover, they are generally to be had for the trouble of collecting them, after they have once covered the cost of their production in the form of clothing materials; when, through being frayed by repeated washings, they undergo a preparation which particularly adapts them to the purpose of paper-making.

[Increasing use of wood and straw.] The more paper-making progresses, the more are ligneous fibers brought forward, particularly wood and straw, which produce really good pastes; all the raw materials being imported from a distance.  That England takes so much sparto is easily explained by the fact that she has very little straw of her own, for most of the grain consumed by her is received from abroad in a granulated condition.

CHAPTER XXV

[Tobacco revenue.] Of all the productions of the country tobacco is the most important, so far (at least) as concerns the Government, which have the cultivation of this plant, its manipulation, and sale, the subjects of an extensive and strictly guarded monopoly, and derives a very considerable portion of the public revenue therefrom. [232] As to the objections raised against this revenue on the score of its being opposed to justice and morality, many other sources of revenue in the colonial budget might be condemned (such as the poll-tax, gaming and opium licenses, the brandy trade, and the sale of indulgences); yet none is so invidious and pernicious as the tobacco monopoly.

[Injustice of the monopoly.] Often in the course of this narrative of my travels I have had occasion to commend the clemency of the Spanish Government.  In glaring contrast therewith, however, stands the management of the tobacco regulations.  They appropriated the fields of the peasantry without the slightest indemnification—­fields which had been brought under cultivation for their necessary means of sustenance; forced them, under penalty of bodily punishment, to raise, on the confiscated property, an article which required an immense amount of trouble and attention, and which yielded a very uncertain crop; and they then valued the harvested leaves arbitrarily and without any appeal, and, in the most favorable case, paid for them at a nominal price fixed by themselves.  To be paid at all, indeed, appears to have been a favor, for it has not been done in full now for several years in succession.  Spain regularly remains indebted to the unlucky peasants in the amount of the miserable pittance allowed, from one year’s end to another.  The Government ordered the officials to exact a higher return from the impoverished population of the tobacco districts; and even rewarded informers who, after pointing out fields already owned, but which were considered suitable to the cultivation of tobacco, were installed into possession of the proclaimed lands in the place of the original owners.