Indiana State Sentinel

Tobacco
The nations of the civilized world are deriving just now one of the largest items in their respective revenues from this weed which vanishes in smoke. The Pope would be bankrupt in a month if tobacco should fail, or men should stop smoking, for he enjoys an income of some hundred thousand scudi every year out of his monopoly of the trade, which is farmed out to a well known banking and commercial house in Rome. France would suffer enormously if the anti-tobacco society should convert the French nation from cigarettes, pipes and snuff. England would reduce her revenues disastrously if the practice of using tobacco were abandoned there.
The revenue of Great Britain from tobacco alone was last year £5,604,032, or say $28,000,000. The revenue of France from tobacco, for nine months in the year 1860, was 138,355,000 francs, or say $27,000,000, to which add one-third for the remaining three months, and we have an item of $36,000,000 going into the coffers of the Gallic emperor every year from the smoking and snuffing habits of his people. Chewing is not a French or English vice. The item in the Papal revenue is so large that we may safely affirm that Louis Napoleon would be spared the bother of settling the question of the temporal power, if he could extinguish pipes and cigars in the Roman dominions. Who ever thought before how largely the Catholic Church is dependent on the vapor of nicotine!
America and England are the only civilized nations which we now call to mind, in which the growing, preparing, selling and using of tobacco is entirely free from Government interference, by direct taxation, but this is not to be the case hereafter, and we are to join the other great nations who derive parts of their internal revenue from the smoke of the Virginia weed. France monopolizes the trade entirely. Spain does something of the same sort. The Pope sells, directly or indirectly, all the tobacco that is used in his dominions.
When it thus appears that the habit of smoking is a matter of national and world wide importance, the history of the habit becomes more interesting than as a mere curious question of the past. It has been by some doubted whether it was of American origin. The well known story of the importation of the custom into England from the shores of the Western continent is without doubt correct, but it has been suggested that the fact of finding the greatest nation of smokers in the world in the Orient, namely the Turks, and finding tobacco there also, indicates a knowledge of the custom in the East wholly independent of the American discovery. Examination leads. however, to the conviction that this is one of the customs which the Turks have derived from civilization. It is well known that prior to the 17th century all the western part of Europe was thoroughly familiar with the Levant. The Saracens, Turks, Arabs and all the inhabitants of Syria. Egypt and Turkey were known to the Venetians, Spaniards, French and English, and it is wholly impossible that the custom of smoking tobacco could exist in the East and not be known in the West. It is nowhere mentioned in the numerous descriptions of the inhabitants of the Eastern countries, written and published prior to the 17th century, and indeed the surprise and curiosity which the introduction of the custom into England caused in that nation, is alone sufficient evidence that it was then a new thing to European and Asian habits of life. The smoking of opium and hasheesh in the East may have been long before practised, but this bears no more resemblance to smoking tobacco, than drinking opium does to drinking wine. The one process is a mere short and rapid application of a stimulant. for the sake of its effects, quite different from the custom of burning a weed, and inhaling, or taking into the mouth, its smoke, from hour to hour. The Mohammedan religion forbids the use of tobacco, "drinking tobacco" as they call it, during certain prescribed fasts. Hence, it has been argued. tobacco was known to Mahommedans long before the discovery of America. The argument fails, for tobacco is not mentioned in the Koran, nor in the earlier traditions which the Moslems regard as of equal authority with their sacred book. But it is included in some of the general formulas of fasting, where it is forbidden to eat or drink during certain hours and days, and no one can fix an early date to these specifications.
We think it may be regarded as certain that America furnished to the world the greatest of its present extravagant habits, and to the nations of Europe their most prolific source of revenue. Since the discovery of the weed here its cultivation has extended over the world. and the East rivals the West in the production of a good article. The chewers of tobacco of course go no farther than Virginia for their supply, but smokers are not thus content. The varieties of smoking tobacco in the markets of the world are numerous. Cuba furnishes the most highly prized cigars; Connecticut furnishes Cuba with leaves for the wrappers of many of these very cigars; Virginia supplies from her immense factories a hundred varieties of fine cut and smoking tobacco; France grows an indefinite quantity of caporal; the mountains of Switzerland, especially some of the slopes near Vevay, produce the best tobacco grown on the continent of Europe; while the Northern slopes of the Lebanon mountains grow the most delicate and highly prized tobacco in the world, which is almost exclusively sold to the Egyptian market, and seldom seen west of Alexandria, Persia produces fine varieties of tobacco, and the cultivation extends into all parts of Asia where the plant will grow.
All this for smoke, and yet a smoke which keeps money stirring to and fro, freights ships, turns the wheels of factories supports kings and dynasties. One does not feel it quite as much in America as in Europe, but in France or Italy, when a man enjoys a quiet cigar he adds to the pleasure of the weed, a satisfaction in knowing that he is humbly contributing to keep in motion the great wheels of Empire, and hereafter American smokers may add the same considerations to their pleasure.-N. Y. Jour. of Com.