gmertca, , ?|emp, an& JUapoleon - Vote Hemp

America, Russia, Hemp, and Napoleonsociety was a vast ocean of serfs in which a tiny number ofaristocrats and bourgeoisie sported like minnows. T o the serfforeign trade meant little. He probably had never seen, muchless consumed, coffee, tea, or sugar. Money meant little to him.That which he ate and the rough garments he wore were theproducts of his ow n labor and that of his fellow peasants. If allthe world outside Russia had been suddenly cut off, it wouldhave brought no overwhelming change to his life. H e wouldhave had to give up hemp andflaxas major crops because themarket for them would have disappeared, and this dislocationmight have brought, let us say, three rather than two faminesin his lifetime, but nothing to which he wasn't already inured.Like most things that live in and of the soil—like rabbits andgrass and bears—he had a high survival quotient.O n the other hand, foreign trade made a world of differenceto the nobility, who, after all, did run Russia. It probably madean even greater difference to the bourgeoisie, but they—a fewmerchants in a society still medieval—had influence only insofaras they could earn a noble's favor. T o the Russian noble,trade with the West was essential because it was the onlymeans he knew to maintain the kind of life he had come toconsider as normal. Th e Russian noble wore English woolens,drank coffee from South America sweetened with sugar fromJamaica, dyed his kerchiefs with indigo from South Carolina,savored his meals with spices from Batavia and wines fromFrance, and read Voltaire and Rousseau in the original. Allthese things came to him by foreign trade, and for these thingshe had to exchange his hemp , flax, iron, timber, etc., or hardcash brought to his coffers by trading in such goods. A culturedand comfortable nobility existed in Russia because the muzhik36