TOBACCO CULTURE.* IT is time to recognise the fact that
wheat, so long the staple of our agricultural products, is becoming commercially extinct ; that though the small-allotment holder will still find economy in growing so much of it as shall keep his family in flour and bread, the farmer or middleman cannot continue to produce at forty shillings what he can only sell for thirty ; and that this virtual effacement of wheat from all holdings of more than a few acres in extent will leave room for the introduction of many crops easily grown in England, but hitherto crowded out from wheat-growing lands and imported from Continental countries. We confine ourselves at present to a crop which has excited much attention in the past year, and which forms the subject of Mr. Meadows Taylor's timely and well-written little book.
The cultivation of tobacco in England was prohibited in 1652, and it has been since grown only as a garden curiosity. In Ireland and Scotland it was produced within the present cen- tury; and in France it forms an extensive and carefully regu- lated branch of farming, which has in the last seventy-five years brought £280,000,000 into the pockets of French home growers. It is controlled by a special Government Administration, known as the" Rdgie des Tabaos," with a fourfold system of manufactories, wholesale warehouses, licensed retailers, and licensed planters. The planters fill the manufactories, the manufactories feed the warehouses, the retailers buy from the warehouses and sell to the public. The number of planters, of acres to be cultivated, nay, of leaves to be delivered, is regulated at the opening of each year by Ministerial edict. The growers are chiefly small proprietors. In the purchases from them lies the profit to the State, which in 1882 amounted to £11,600,000; for the warehouse- keeper is highly salaried, and the retailer is paid by commission upon his sales. Two kinds of tobacco are manufactured,- " Caporal," which is smoked by the general public, and sold at 5s. per lb.; and the inferior "Cantine," sold only to the Army, Navy, and Gendarmerie, at 71d. per lb. There are also fourteen brands of cigars, from the sixpenny imported Havana down to a horrible halfpenny composition, and cigarettes of various denominations.
The soil in which tobacco may be grown is selected by the Government, the most favourable being the alumino-siliceous deposits in the neighbourhood of large rivers, and the stipulated • Tobacco a Parn•r's Crop. By Philip Meadows Taylor. Loudon Stanford.
area being carefully marked out in a rectangular form. For the first year, wheat is put into the ground, followed after harvesting by a heavy crop of scarlet clover, which is mowed early in April, and ploughed into the ground with a dressing of farmyard manure. The laud is harrowed, and left untouched till June, when it is spread over with pulverised oil-cake, again harrowed, and ploughed up into rounded ridges for the reception of the plants, being finally raked and cleaned like a gardener's flower- bed. The seedlings have been prepared upon special seed-beds, 3 ft. wide, of rich, well-manured garden mould, flattened down and covered with fine river-sand. The seeds are sown in early March, sprinkled over with decomposed refuse from the last year's grape dregs, and carefully watered until June. The worms, which would dislodge the roots, are slain by tobacco. juice ; and day after day, the planter's whole household turns out, lantern in hand, an hour before daybreak, to capture and destroy the slugs. The planting-out takes place in the first week of June ; men, women, and children, each with a basketful of seedlings, carefully pricking in the plants at intervals of 3 ft. in each direction, four thousand to the acre. They take root in a fortnight, during which the beds are visited daily, to remove and replace the feeble speci- mens. Soon the flower-buds appear, to be instantly cut off ; all the leaves are plucked, except those, from six to ten in number, prescribed by the Regie ; the ground between the rows is broken and raked around the roots. In mid-September, yellow spots appear upon the leaves, a sign that they are ready for the harvest. Cut close to the ground, the plants are tied together in pairs and slung on rods in the drying-house, where they re- main without artificial heat until the end of November. The leaves are by this time dry and ripe; they are stripped from the stalks, laid one upon another in heaps 2 ft. high, covered with straw, with blankets, with linen bed-sheets. Finally, they are sorted according to size and quality, taken in bales to the manufactories, overhauled, valued, paid for at from 3d. to 7d. per lb., the planter considering £30 an acre a fairly remunerative price.
There is no doubt that, so far as climate is concerned, tobacco can be grown in England. That is proved by the records of the past, and by Messrs. Carter's experiment at Plaistow. The plant, in fact, is in the open air only from June to mid-Septem- ber, when no frosts occur. But can the English farmer grow it at a profit ? Can he hope to compete in a free market with the Bengal grower, who pays 4s. a week in wages, and even so clears only £5 per acre by his crops ? Or, supposing that our English Government could imitate the French Rdgie, control and supply the production and the sale at home, and shut out foreign competition, can the farmer rear, manufacture, and deliver it without a loss? Lord Harris's estimate of £40 per acre on the entire cost of leaf-cultivation is probably not much below the mark. The seeds must in this country be brought forward under glass; the incessant labour of weeding, slugging, disbudding, performed in France by young children not subject to compulsory education, would here fall to full. waged labourers, untrained to delicate handling, and without the motive to conscientious completeness which is supplied to the French peasant by his proprietorship of the soil and crop. The curing of the gathered plants will involve costly drying. houses, maintained for weeks at a high temperature by artificial beat, requiring incessant skilled supervision, lest a too dry atmosphere should crumble the leaf to snuff, or too great moisture should cause it to ferment. When all this is suc- cessfully achieved, and the cured weed delivered into the bonding-warehouse, how much of the £35 per acre which is the highest gross price that has ever been paid in France upon delivery, will remain after all expenses are defrayed P How inevitable the loss in the earlier years of inexperience; how doubtful the profit in the end !
But what the wage-paying farmer cannot do may be done by the self-working labourer. Few French tobacco-fields are more than one hectare, or two and a half acres, in extent; many are mere garden plots ; and the entire culture is performed by the peasant and his family. An English labourer with an acre holding could well afford to set apart one-fourth of an acre for tobacco, to grow on it one thousand plants raised in boxes in his windows, to manure from his pigstye, to find the labour in his own family, to cure the leaf on the rafters of his own kitchen, and to realise £8 or £9 by the year's work. This sup- poses the establishment of a Government Department, the creation of central district bonding-houses, with an Excise
superintendent and subaltern officer in each ; the leaf would be bought from the planters as in France, and lodged in bond to await the purchasers, whose payments would include the duty.
Such a revolution is remote, if not impossible ; but there remains another aspect of the question more feasible and more immediate. Under the names of " shag," "black-jack," "old friend," " thin twist," or " bird's-eye," the rural labourer smokes strong, adulterated tobacco, for which he pays from 3d. to 4d. per oz., consuming on an average 3 oz. a week, or about 101b. a year. Now, 101b. represents about one hundred plants, which could be grown on a mere strip of allotment land less than one-fortieth of the acre. We have seen (and smoked) within the last few days, in a Midland county, tobacco from a cake weighing half-a-pound, which was sown under glass in February, pricked out into a box in April, planted in a kitchen-garden in June, gathered in the first week of September, and cured in a cucumber-frame. It is of good second-rate quality, and it is tobacco, which cannot with cer- tainty be affirmed of the compounds we have named above. Of course it was produced surreptitiously, and a relaxation of the existing law is necessary in order that the attempt may be extended. But if the Executive would grant permission during the next five years to all holders of allotments not exceeding one acre in extent to grow and core free of duty tobacco not ex- ceeding 10 lb. in weight when cared, for their own consumption and not for sale, the experiment would be tried on a sufficient scale, and with sufficient variety of soil, treatment, and result, to solve the problem which Messrs. Carter's enterprise has initiated, and to which Mr. Taylor's clear and practical essay will be a valuable auxiliary.
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