Billions in Smoke

Prince Bismarck declared, towards the end of his days, that destiny fixed the total of every man's consumption of pleasurable goods. His own two major quotas, he specified, were 36,000 bottles of wine and 150,000 strong cigars. Statisticians do not know how many inhabitants of the U. S. consumed the 97,176,607,484 cigarets manufactured in 1927. Women have come to swell the legion, and for the first time in history the 1927 advertising budgets contained provisions for direct appeals to them. (Marlboro cigarets pushed the first overt advertising campaign for women smokers.) Production of cigarets last year was more than double that of 1920 and six times as great as that of 1914.

Cigaret advertising budgets for the three leading manufacturers--R. J. Reynolds, American Tobacco, and Liggett & Myers --was estimated at from $60,000,000 to $70,000,000 for 1928.

"What the country needs most is a good five-cent cigar," was a dictum of late Vice President Thomas R. Marshall which passed into the nation's higher political criticism. That statesman would doubtless derive considerable satisfaction at the present triumph of his wish. In 1927 the production of 5 cent cigars was 3,175,157,870, or 48.3% of all cigars manufactured, and an increase of 10% over the 5 cent production of 1926. Snuff, another inexpensive form of tobacco, likewise established a new high record with 40,154,792 pounds, an increase of 5.4%. The decline of 4.9% in production of the classification listed as "manufactured tobacco" is attributed to the passing of the tobacco chewing habit.

The country's tobacco tax bill for 1927, as reported by the Government, was $387,427,881, of which $291,620,773 came from the little pale blue portraits of De Witt Clinton on the internal revenue stamps of cigaret packages.*

*Government revenue last year on playing cards was close to $5,000,000, on 47,421,835 packs.