The Montgomery advertiser., 1902-02-02
PEDIGREE OF THE CIGARETTE
How It Displaced the Pipe in Eng fish Affections

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, 1t Is interesting to trace back the pedigree of the modern substitute for the cigar. Those of us who can recall the outbreak of the Fran co-Prussian war-how the French have forgotten our sympathy with them, the hundreds of bales of bandages and med fcal comforts and the ambulance parties which we sent te their aid-knew the Brtish-smoked cigarette in it's infancy in the form of a miniature imitation of cigar, composed of tobacco rolled up in a paper cover which was concealed in a to- Dacco leaf In order to effect the illusion. No genuine smoker would have been seen with such a make-believe in his mouth, but 1t came as a boon. If not blessing to the school boy in his furtive experi- ments behind hedge or to the middle aged man as stepping stone to the mild Manila or the more robust Havana in the rays when many a staid professional man or tradesman had reached middle age be- lore he realized that smoking could be tndulged in without imperiIing his health or his respectabilitv.
 Personally we recall a disagreeable ex- perience, the result of our first acquaiut- ance with tobacco in the form aforesaid, In a secluded spot on the cliffs between Folkstone and Shornclffe. A few months later we were on terms of intimacy with Russian cigarettes in Films. and the next summer. ip. nearly. if not quite. the last year of the gambling tables in Germany with the "Rheinholdt. with it's spiral mouth-piece. in Baden Baden. Thencew we returned to England with-a dozen boxes of. Rheinboldts q little uncertain as to whether we should be bold enough to smoke a real white cigarette in the streets of London. To our surprise 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 continental habit of cigarette smoking. and that he favored the Rhein- boldt. Whether his Hoyal Highness had ever smoked this particular cigarette or not we and our Rheinboldt. so long as they lasted, were much in request Thenceforth cigarete smoking was toler- ated in London, though praeticed only to a limited extent. and some of the club committees supplied them under protest
 La Ferme" and Russian. the latter sup piled with wooden mouthpiece in every box; competed with the importa tions from Baden-Baden. closely followed by the
 Oxford" and the Cambridge" differ ing mainly in the color of the. boxes, and both with tubular mouthpieces of compressed paper Algerian cigarettes appeared soon afterwards. but did not find much favor
 The first specialist in cigarettes whom we can recall in London was Economi- des. in Regent Street. whose shop front was nearly mQnopoliZed by the model of a mosque with its dome composed of loose tobacco. and it's columns of Turkish cigarettes. That was about 1873, the year of the Ashanti expedition. which we regarded as a war because we had aI- most forgotten the Crimea. and had not dreampt of a South African campaign with a British force of a quarter of a mil lion. And. by the way. how little we then thought that the time would ever come when British soldiers on active ser vice would prefer cigarettes t0 almost any other form of luxury on the march or in the hospital. Economides contrib uted largely to the taste for Turkish cigarettes. as did Morris and others, and later Marcovitch was for household word with smokers of Egyptians" and Constanunople gradually gave way to Cairo. until the jeunesse doree affected to smoke nothing but cigarettes freshly imported from the khedive's capital: the silver cigarette case became as necessary to the well appointed Englishman as a dress suit. and gold tips were the height of luxury.
 It was in the carly ninetics that thanks to the hoavv importations of cheap cigarettes from America cigar ette smoking became. strictly speaking popular in this country. Now we see rival mammoth manufacturers catering