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SEVILLE 39
must give the nation in return an annual bonus of
eighteen million dollars. Although climate and soil
are excellently adapted for the raising of tobacco, the
peasant is not permitted to plant the seed even for his
own use. The Company spends an additional twelve
million dollars in order to enforce this provision and
to guard the borders of the country against smugglers.
After obtaining these thirty million dollars, additional
funds must be applied to the purchase of raw materials
and to the process of manufacture; profits have to be
assured to retailers and the Company itself must se-
cure a handsome income. It would be no exaggeration
to state that the amount that goes up in smoke annually
in Spain is much more than fifty million dollars.
There is smoking in the theaters during the per-
formance; in banks, post-offices and municipal bureaus.
Every one down to the merest clerk has his cigarette in
his mouth. The barber smokes while shaving his cus-
tomer; the waiter carelessly flicks off his ashes while
serving at table; the public speaker will halt in the
middle of his most incendiary utterance to take a puff
at his cigarette. During mass, the priest will slink
away behind the altar to light his cigarette, and the
same priest will carry his lighted cigarette through the
streets, concealed in the wide sleeve of his robe. Chil-
dren receive a regular allowance of tobacco from their
parents; old women sit in the sunlight outside the vil-
lages, chewing the butt of an old cigar. Everybody
smokes, in spite of the tax. Those that have no money
go about collecting moist cigarette butts; and it is not
unheard-of to have men, garbed in long cloaks, fol-
lowing you for a quarter of an hour hoping that you
may throw away your cigar.
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