more forcibly shown by a comparison of our total imports in that and the following year.  In 1850 we imported 48,300,000 lbs.; in 1851, 71,500,000 lbs., being an increase of 23,200,000 lbs.  Doubtless the Chinese export, if made up totally with our year, would not account for the whole quantity, part of which is to be set down to Chinese export-smuggling, and part to arrivals from America and the Continent.  The probability is that the increase of price referred to above never reached the Chinese tea farmers; the supply came from the merchants’ stock on hand.  The rise was, besides, uncertain, and from any established advance a much larger increase of export might be looked for.

But the mistake made in England in estimating what tea we may look for from China goes upon the supposition that they grow expressly for us:  the fact being, as stated by Mr. Robt.  Fortune, in his recently published “Tea Districts of China,” “that the quantity exported bears but a small proportion to that consumed by the Chinese themselves.”  On this point the report of the Parliamentary Committee is explicit:—­“There is a population in China, commonly assumed at above three hundred millions, at all hours in the day consuming tea, which only requires some change of preparation to be fit for exportation; thus implying an amount of supply on which any demand that may be made for foreign export can be, after a very short time, but slightly felt.”  Mr. Fortune, in his evidence, says “that the Chinese drink about four times as much as we do:  they are always drinking it.”  Four times as much is probably very much an under-estimate.  With rich and poor of all that swarming population, tea, not such as our working classes drink, but fresh and strong, and with no second watering, accompanies every meal.  But even taking their consumption at four times as much per head as ours, and their population at the lowest estimate, at three hundred millions, their consumption, setting ours at 55,000,000 lbs., will be no less than two thousand two hundred millions of pounds per annum, or forty times the quantity used in the United Kingdom.  As reasonably might the few foreigners who visit the metropolis in the summer expect to cause a famine of fruit and vegetables in London, as we that a doubling of our demand for tea would be felt in China.  The further fifty-five million pounds would be but another fortieth of what they use themselves, and would have no more effect upon their entire market than the arrival of some thousand strangers within the year in London would have upon the supply of bread or butchers’ meat.  There is no need, therefore, to wait for the extension of tea plantations, and so far from taking for granted the statement of the late Chancellor of the Exchequer, “that time must be given to increase production, and that the point of its taking three or four years to make a tea-tree is to be considered in dealing with the duties,” we have the fact unmistakeably before