When we remember that the tea plant attains to maturity in three years, and its leaves are then fit for picking; and that there is a vast extent of country to which it is indigenous, growing in every climate between the equator and the latitude of 45 degrees, it is evident that, were there a necessity for it, the actual production of tea in China could be increased to an almost unlimited extent in the space of three or four years, an extent far more than compensating for the extra three per cent., which might be, in the first instance, required by the British.

The certainty of an increased consumption following upon a reduction in the price of tea to the actual consumers of it, is so obvious as to require demonstration to those only who have not considered the subject.  The population of Great Britain and Ireland is, say in round numbers 30,000,000, the actual consumption of tea is only 54,000,000 lbs., or little more than one pound and three quarters for each individual.  In the neighbouring island of Jersey, there are nearly five lbs. of tea consumed by every inhabitant yearly; and as we may fairly infer from analogy that similar results would arise from a similar cause, the consumption in the United Kingdom in the same ratio would amount to no less than 150 millions of pounds annually.

Tea, observes a most competent authority (Mr. J. Ingram Travers), is the favourite drink of the people:  all desire to have it strong and good, and none who can afford it are without it.  But in the agricultural districts the laborers use but little; numbers of them “make tea with burnt crusts, because the China tea is too dear.”  In Ireland the consumption is greatly below that of England; there are comparatively few people who do not, on company occasions, make their tea stronger than for ordinary use, and the general economy in the use of tea forms an exception to almost every other article of consumption.  As to the working classes in the manufacturing districts, Mr. Bayley, President of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, himself a very extensive manufacturer, and therefore well qualified to speak to the fact, says:—­“The common calculation of two ounces per head per week I should think is very much in excess of what the working classes consume.  Domestic servants, I believe, have that quantity allowed them, but I should say that the working classes do not consume one quarter of that.”  And yet it is these classes who are the great consumers of everything cheap enough to be within their reach.  It is this consumption that, under better earnings, has sustained the steady increase of nearly two million pounds of tea per annum for the last eight years, and still there is such ample room for increase that domestic servants are allowed at least four times as much per head as those working people who value, more than any other class, the cheerful refreshingness of tea, but who, stinted in its use by the exorbitant duty, are tempted and almost driven to the use, instead, of degrading drinks.