[2] Quoted in Cunningham’s Life of Harlow.

* * * * *

NOTES OF A READER.

TEA.

What can we do with this pamphlet?—­British Relations with the Chinese Empire—­Comparative Statement of the English and American Trade with India and Canton.  What a book for a tea-drinking old lady, or Dr. Johnson, of tea-loving notoriety, with his thirteen cups to the dozen.

“The writer has passed the last eleven years of his life in visiting every quarter of the globe, and the colonial possessions of Great Britain, in order to acquire an intimate knowledge of her commercial affairs, for political purposes.”  The reader will, perhaps, say this pamphlet is purely political, and what have you to do with it?  But it is not so:  there are facts in these pages which interest every one and come home to every man’s mouth:  the political purpose is to us like chaff; and these facts like grains of wheat, so we will even pick a few.  Meanwhile, the whole pamphlet must be important to all, as to ourselves parts are interesting:  it represents the literature of the tea trade, and, best of all, the profitable literature of L.s.d. It is written in a patriotic spirit; witness this extract from the preface:  “To a commercial union of wealth, and a co-operation of talent and patriotism, a small island in the Western Atlantic is indebted for the acquisition of one of the most splendid empires that ever was subjected to the dominion of man, and also for the rise and progress of an extraordinary commerce with a people inhabiting a distant hemisphere, and heretofore shut out from all intercourse with the majority of the human race;—­a commerce equal in extent to 10,000,000_l_. annually, and involving property to the amount of ten times that sum.”

Our facts must stand isolated, since to weave them into an argument would be altogether foreign to our purpose.

East India Company.—­Although the East India Company can alone import tea, they cannot choose their own time of sale; they are compelled to put up the tea at an advance of one penny (they do at one farthing) per lb.; they are obliged to have twelve months’ stock in hand; and while the tea in America has increased in price and diminished in consumption, the very reverse has taken place in England, as official returns prove!

China presents the very remarkable spectacle of a civilization entirely political, whose principal aim has constantly been to draw closer the bonds which unite the society it formed, and to merge, by its laws, the interest of the individual in that of the public; an empire possessing an active, skilful, and contented population of 155,000,000 souls, who are spread over 1,372,450 square miles of the fairest and, probably, earliest inhabited region of the globe—­that maintains a standing army of 1,182,000 men,