price, but the tobacco furnished him is of a much inferior quality to ours. “Petit-caporal” smoking-tobacco, the delight of the middling classes of Paris, hardly suits an American’s taste.  In Italy more than one pubblicano has enriched himself and bought nobility by farming the public revenues from tobacco and salt.  In Austria the cigars are detestable, though Hungary grows good tobacco, and its Turkish border furnishes some of the meerschaum clay.  German smoking-tobaccoes are favorites with students here, but owe their excellence to their mode of manufacture.

Tobacco, according to some authorities, holds the next place to salt, as the article most universally and largely used by man,—­we mean, of course, apart from cereals and meats.  It is unquestionably the widest-used narcotic.  Opium takes the second rank, and hemp the third; but the opium—­and hashish-eaters usually add the free smoking of tobacco to their other indulgences.

From these great columns of consumption we may logically deduce two prime points for our argument.

1st.  That an article so widely used must possess some peculiar quality producing a desirable effect.

2d.  That an article so widely used cannot produce any marked deleterious effect.

For it must meet some instinctive craving of the human being,—­as bread and salt meet his absolute needs,—­to be so widely sought after and consumed.  Fashion does not rule this habit, but it is equally grateful to the savage and the sage.  And it cannot be so ruinous to body and mind as some reformers assert; otherwise, in the natural progress of causes and effects, whole nations must have already been extinguished under its use.  Many mighty nations have used it for centuries, and show no aggregated deterioration from its employment.  Individual exceptions exist in every community.  They arise either from idiosyncrasy or from excess, and they have no weight in the argument.

Now, what are these qualities and these effects?  We can best answer the first part of the question by a quotation.

“In ministering fully to his natural wants and cravings, man passes through three successive stages.

“First, the necessities of his material nature are provided for.  Beef and bread represent the means by which, in every country, this end is attained.  And among the numerous forms of animal and vegetable food a wonderful similarity of chemical composition prevails.

“Second, he seeks to assuage the cares of his mind, and to banish uneasy reflections.  Fermented liquors are the agents by which this is effected.” [They are variously produced by every people, and the active principle is in all the same, namely, Alcohol.]

“Third, he desires to multiply his enjoyments, intellectual and animal, and for the time to exalt them.  This he attains by the aid of narcotics.  And of these narcotics, again, it is remarkable that almost every country or tribe has its own, either aboriginal or imported; so that the universal instinct of the race has led, somehow or other, to the universal supply of this want or craving also.”