Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 2.djvu/43

Rh the commission directed upon this occasion to the lord-treasurer, "being a drug of late years found out, and brought from foreign parts in small quantities, was taken and used by the better sort, both then and now, only as physic to preserve health; but it is now at this day, through evil custom and the toleration thereof, excessively taken by a number of riotous and disorderly persons of mean and base condition, who do spend most of their time in that idle vanity, to the evil example and corrupting of others, and also do consume the wages which many of them get by their labour, not caring at what price they buy that drug: by which the health of a great number of our people is impaired, and their bodies weakened and made unfit for labour." In his "Counterblast" he affirms that some gentlemen bestowed three, some four hundred pounds a-year "upon this precious stink;" an estimate in which the royal pen must surely be understood to be running on in poetic numbers. When the Virginian colonists began to cultivate tobacco, James complained that they made so much as to overstock the market; and in 1619 he issued a proclamation commanding that the production of it should not exceed the rate of a hundred weight for each individual planter. In this regulation, however, his majesty appears to have had an eye to the interests of the royal revenue as well as to the health of his people; for he at the same time confines the right of importing the commodity to such persons as he should license for that purpose; in other words, he takes the monopoly of it into his own hands, and avows it to be his object to raise its price. In a proclamation of the next year enforcing this restriction upon the cultivation of the plant, which had not been strictly attended to, he again inveighs against the use of tobacco, as "tending to a general and new corruption of men's bodies and manners." Nevertheless he holds it, "of the two, more tolerable that the same should be imported, amongst many other vanities and superfluities which come from beyond seas, than to be permitted to be planted here within this realm, thereby to abuse and misemploy the soil of this fruitful kingdom." At length, in the last