The Savannah morning news. (Savannah, Ga.) 1900-current, 1901-12-01
PEDIGREE OF THE CIGARETTE.
How 1t Displaced the Pipe In Eng
Iish Affections.
From the Pail Mall Gazette.

From the Pail Mall Gazette.
Now that the threatened combine"
In the tobacco trade emphasizes the
great Importance of the cigarette as an
article of British commerce. it is inter-
esting to trace back the pedigree of
the modern substitute for the cigar.
Those of us who can recall the out
break of the Franco-Prussian war
how the French have forgotten our
sympathy with them, the hundreds of
bales of bandages and medical com
forts and the ambulance parties which
we sent to their aid,-knew the Brit
ish-smOked cigarette in it's infancy in
the form of a miniature imitation of a
cigar composed of tobacco rolled up in
paper cover which was concealed In
a tobacco leaf in order to effect the IL
fusion. No geneuine smoker would
have been seen with such a make be-
lieve in his mouth, but 1t came as a
boon, if not a blessing, to the school
boy in his furtive experiments behind
a hedge or to the middle-aged man as
a stepping stone to the mild Manila or
the more robust Havana in the days
when many staid professional man or
tradesman had reached middle age be
fore he realized that smoking could be
INDUCED in without imperiling his
health or his responsibility,
Personally we recall a disagreeable
experience, the result of our first &C
quaintance with tobacco in the form
aforesaid, in a secluded spot on the
cliffs between Folkestone and Shorn-
clilte. A few months later we were
on terms of intimacy with Russian CT
garettes in Ems, and the next summer,
in nearly, if not quite, the last year of
the gambling tables in Germany, with
the "Rheinboldt." with it's spiral
mouthpiece, in Baden Baden. Thence
we returned to England with a dozen
boxes of Rheinboldts. a little uncer,
tain as to whether we should be bold
enough to smoke a real white cigarette
in the streets of London. To our sur
prise, we found ourselves in the van
of a new fashion One of the weekly
papers-we fancy it was Vanity Fair
had recently announced that the
Prince of Wales had adopted the Con-
tinental habit or cigarette smoking,
and that he favored the Rheinboldt.
Whether his Royal Highness had ever
smoked this particular cigarette or not,
we and our Rheinboldts, so long as
they lasted, were much in request.
Thenceforth cigarette smoking was toll
Grated in London, though practiced on
ly to a limited extent and some of the
club committees supplied them under
protest. La Ferme'' and Russian, the
latter supplied with wooden mouth
piece in every box, competed with the
importations from Baden Baden, close
~ followed by the "Oxford" and the
Cambridge" differing mainly in the
color of the boxes, and both with tu-
bular mouthpieces of compressed pa
per. Algerian cigarettes appeared soon
afterward, but did not find much ia
vor.
The first specialist in cigarettes
whom we can recall in London was
Economics, in Regent street, whose
shop was nearly monopolized by the
model of a mosque with its dome COM
posed of loose tobacco. and it's col
umns of Turkish cigarettes. That was
in about 1873, the year of the Ashanti
expedition, which we regarded as a
war because we had almost forgot ten
the Crimea, and had not dreamt of a
South African campaign with a British
force of a quarter of a million. And,
by the way, how little we then thought
that the time would ever come when
British soldiers on active service would
prefer cigarettes to almost any other
form of luxury on the march or in hos
pital! Economics contributed largely
to the taste for Turkish cigarettes, as
ala MOTIFS ana OIneTS, anu ldleI Wal :
covitch was for a time a household
word with smokers of Egyptians, +"
and Constantinople gradually gave way
to Cairo, until the jeunesse doree af-
fected to smoke nothing but cigarettes
freshly imported from the KhediVe's
capital; the silver cigarette case be-
came as necessary to the well-appoint-
ed. Englishman as a dress suit, and
gold tips" were the height of luxury.
1t was in the early nineties that,
thanks to the heavy importations of
cheap cigarettes from America, cigar
cite smoking became strictly speaking
popular in this country. Now we see
rival mammoth manufacturers cater
ing for the million on both sides of
the Atlantic. and the British working
man has almost abandoned his clay
pipe and shag in favor of the two
penny packet of cigarettes, with a
portrait of favorite actress or khaki
clad general given in. And it is not a
matter of sex. The Russian countess
is no longer conspicuous when she
smokes after dinner in the conserva-
tory of an English country house, and
advertisements of special cigarettes for
ladies are seen side by side with those
of corsets and complexion restorers IN
the pages of six-penny fashion papers