home, China would return it all to one or another field.
The home consumption of tobacco in the United States averaged seven pounds per capita in 1902. A like consumption for China's four hundred millions would call for 2800 million pounds of leaf. If she grew it on her fields two million acres would not suffice. Her soils would be proportionately depleted and she would be short forty million bushels of wheat; but if China continues to import her tobacco the vast sum expended can neither fertilize her fields nor feed, clothe or educate her people, yet a like sum expended in the importation of wheat would feed her hungry and enrich her soils.
In the matter of conservation of national resources here is one of the greatest opportunities open to all civilized nations. What might not be done in the United States with a fund of $57,000,000 annually, the market price of the raw tobacco leaf, and the land, the labor and the capital expended in getting the product to the men who puff, breathe and perspire the noxious product into the air everyone must breathe, and who bespatter the streets, sidewalks, the floor of every public place and conveyance, and befoul the million spittoons, smoking rooms and smoking cars, all unnecessary and should be uncalled for, but whose installation and up-keep the non-user as well as the user is forced to pay, and this in a country of, for and by the people. This costly, filthy, selfish tobacco habit should be outgrown. Let it begin in every new home, where the mother helps the father in refusing to set the example, and let its indulgence be absolutely prohibited to everyone while in public school and to all in educational institutions.
Mr. League had been given a letter of introduction to one of the leading farmers of the village and it chanced that as we reached the entranceway to his home we were met by his son, just returning from the fields with his drill on his shoulder, and it is he standing in the illustration, Fig. 131, holding the letter of introduction in his hand. After we had taken this photograph and another
