The second is that it is expensive. Our tobacco bill for a few years would pay the cost of the war. It would do a much better thing: It would provide agricultural reclamation, commercial development, and philanthropic beneficence on a world scale. The soldier cannot afford to pay this bill. Neither can the free-hearted public afford to assume that it is one of the necessities of war and pay it from benevolent funds. The 1917 tobacco crop of more than one billion pounds brought an average of twenty-five cents a pound. This was two-fifths more than the price during the preceding year and twice the price during the years between 1911 and 1915. The third is that it is increasing. The 1917 tobacco crop was the largest in our history. Estimated at 1,196,451,000 pounds, it was an increase of 43,181,000 pounds over the crop of the preceding year. The output of cigars was 8,266,770,593, an increase of 876,587,423 over that of 1916. A total of 35,377,751 pounds of snuff were manufactured during 1917, an increase of two million pounds over 1916. Of smoking and chewing tobacco, 445,763,206 pounds were put upon the market, an increase of more than twenty-eight million pounds. Tax was paid on thirty billions of cigarettes, and nobody knows how many were rolled and smoked from prepared tobacco. The sale of cigarettes increased almost fifty per cent during 1917. This serves to show with what success our widespread pro-tobacco propaganda has met. The internal revenue income on tobacco advanced fifteen million dollars during 1917. The total was $103,201,592.16. Thirty-eight million dollars of this was on cigarettes alone. Great as this income is, it cannot compensate for the lowered personal standards, the physical disintegration, and the unuttered regret that have resulted from it. Creating a Demand (1919) There are two ways of attacking the business problem. One is to take advantage of opportunities already brought into existence by the laws of chance or the work of others. The other is to make advantage by the creation of opportunities which would otherwise never have existed. The first can be done by any person of average intelligence. It calls for no ingenuity. Its only demand is the time and effort necessary to buy goods on the one hand and sell them on the other. The second calls for a really high-grade of business ability. The man who can do it well has his success reasonably assured. Business is ordinarily assumed to be subject to the law of supply and demand. It happens to be true, however, that the matter of supply and demand is more or less subject to conditions which can be either created or altered by human interference and guidance. The selfish and designing have long ago discovered means of so manipulating market conditions as to make supply and demand a negligible factor. Such, of course, is not the kind of business method which will be allowed to permanently survive.