and other propitious circumstances, would relieve at once the Insular Treasury from its difficulties; and then the tobacco monopoly might be cheerfully surrendered.  One circumstance favorable to the economical management of the State that would be produced by the surrender of the tobacco monopoly would be the abolition of the numerous army of officials which its administration requires.  This might, however, operate reversely in Spain.  The number of place-hunters created must be very welcome to the ministers in power, who thus have the opportunity of providing their creatures with profitable places, or of shipping off inconvenient persons to the Antipodes from the mother-country, free of cost.  The colony, be it known, has not only to pay the salaries, but also to bear the cost of their outward and homeward voyages.  Any way, the custom is so liberally patronized that occasionally new places have to be created in order to make room for the newly-arrived nominees. [244]

[Wholesale rate highter than retail government.] At the time of my visit, the royal factories could not turn out a supply of cigars commensurate with the requirements of commerce; and this brought about a peculiar condition of things; the wholesale dealer, who purchased cigars in very considerable quantities at the government auctions, paying higher than the retail rates at which he could buy them singly in the estancia.  In order, therefore, to prevent the merchants drawing their stocks from the estancias, it was determined that only a certain quantity should be purchased, which limit no merchant dared exceed.  A very intricate system of control, assisted by espionage, had to be employed in seeing that no one, through different agents and different estancias, collected more than the authorised supply; and violation of this rule, when discovered, was punished by confiscation of the offender’s stock.  Everybody was free to purchase cigars in the estancia, but nobody was permitted to sell a chest of cigars to an acquaintance at cost price.  Several Spaniards with whom I have spoken concerning these strange regulations maintained them to be perfectly just, as otherwise all the cigars would be carried off by foreigners, and they would not be able themselves in their own colony to smoke a decent cigar.

[Money juggling.] There was, as I afterwards learnt, a still more urgent reason for the existence of these decrees.  The government valued their own gold at sixteen dollars per ounce, while in commerce it fetched less, and the premium on silver had, at one time, risen to thirty-three per cent.  Moreover, on account of the insufficient quantity of copper money for minor currency, the small change frequently gained a premium on the silver dollar, so much so that by every purchaser not less than half a dollar was realized.  In exchanging the dollar from five to fifteen per cent discount was charged; it was profitable, therefore, to purchase cigars in the estancias with the gold ounce, and then to retail them in smaller quantities nominally at the rate of the estancias.  Both premiums together might in an extreme case amount to as much as forty-three per cent. [245]