Tobacco-leaves for cigarettes are cut into thread--generally
called "long cut,"--and the whole process of making is done by one
machine. I have seen nine of these hard at work, each turning out
12,000 cigarettes a day, making 38,000,000 in a year.
Smoking, a Universal Habit.
Smoking goes on in the Philippines everywhere but in church--in the
hotel dining-room as soon as coffee is served, and at the theatre or
opera while the audience is gathering, and between the acts. Even your
cab-driver will offer you a cigar, if he thinks you have none. Spanish
women of wealth and rank--grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and nieces
sit on the balconies of their beautiful residences in the capital,
puffing away at their cigarillos,--a tiny brand made especially for
feminine consumption; while in some homes men and women help themselves
from the same box.
It is an incongruous sight, and one hostile to the accepted ideas
of a splendid type of primitive man, to see in the depths of remote
provinces native men and women, young and old, of striking physical
proportions, the men nude but for the flimsy breech-clout, smoking
away at cigars, cigarettes, and even pipes; and at every possible
and impossible angle of incidence.
For cigars and cigarettes have for many years been sold everywhere
throughout the colony,--in even the remotest hamlets.
Besides, considerable stimulus has been given to the smoking habit in
the wildest provinces by travelers, who, to ingratiate themselves with
the half-savage natives of distant provinces, or to keep them from
speculating whether one is a Spaniard or not, and thereby arousing
their ire, bountifully dispense cigars and cigarettes wherever they go.
And so the dominant and absorbing habit of the Filipinos is to smoke.
Indeed, the common habit of smoking makes it possible to realize the
Arabian Nights' stories of fabulous fortunes made in the Philippines
in a short time from the cultivation, preparation, and manufacture
of the fragrant leaf.
THE CULTIVATION OF COFFEE.
The Origin of the Industry.
In the early part of the nineteenth century several Spaniards began
the cultivation of coffee in a little valley away at the north end
of Luzon. The trees they planted were the first coffee plants ever
known on the island. A small wild animal, somewhat like a weasel,
somewhat like a fox, began eating and scattering the growing berries,
until in this way myriads of the little creatures had unwittingly
sown coffee seeds over all the island.
Some of these original plants still bear fruit, thousands of pounds
being gathered from the wild bushes. Plantation owners in that
vicinity, the province of Batangas, have, indeed, assured me that the
trees possessed by their grandfathers are still vigorous; while it is
also a well-known fact that in many other coffee-producing colonies
the plants are quite exhausted by the end of the thirtieth year.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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