CHAPTER III.—THE COAL EXCHANGE.

Near to the Custom House rises one of the most ornate edifices in the metropolis,—the Coal Exchange of London,—in which is carried on one of our most stupendous trades.

It is Wednesday—a market day—we ascend the steps of a beautiful sort of round tower, and pass through the folding swing-doors of the principal entrance. The space here, or little vestibule, forms the base of the centre of a well-staircase of iron. You look up, through the coiling balustrades as they climb up to the top, and at the very top you see a painting in the Rubens style of colouring, (though a long way _after_ Rubens in other respects,) of the figure of a prodigal lady, who is upsetting a cornucopia, full—_not_ of coals—but of all the most richly coloured fruits of Italy and the East, which seem about to descend straight through the centre of the well-staircase, and shower down upon your wondering and expectant head. Cupids—or, at least, little chubby boys, tumbling in the air—are also in attendance on this theatrical Goddess of Abundance.

Passing from this entrance into the grand central market, you find yourself in a circular area boarded with oak planks of a light and dark hue, arranged in a kind of mosaic of long angles, which converge to a centre piece, wherein a great anchor is inlaid. Beside this, there is a wooden dagger, to the blade of which a legend of no interest is attached. Three ranges of cast-iron galleries rise all round, terminating above in a large glass dome, with an orange-coloured centre of stained glass. Around the floor of the area, at due intervals, long desks of new polished oak, with inkstands let into the wood, stand invitingly ready for the transaction of business. The City Arms, on a series of small shields, is the simple adornment of the outer balustrade-work of the three galleries,—except, also, that these galleries often have many lady-visitors who lean over and contemplate the ‘dark doings’ of the busy black-diamond merchants who congregate below.

But let it not be supposed that the ornaments of the Coal Exchange of London are confined to the City Arms, or even the beauty of the lady-visitors. Private offices, and recesses for business, having the most neat, orderly appearance, even to a primness and propriety worthy of the Society of Friends, are observable round the area, beneath the galleries; but the panels of the woodwork that separate these offices, rejoice in the most lively adornments, _à la Jullien_. They are covered with emblematic, fanciful, and not very characteristic pictures and designs, all in the brightest hues; and, being painted on a light ground, they have a look of gaiety and airiness quite of a continental character. The weight and gravity of the City has, for once—and by way of smiling antagonism to what every one would expect of a coal-market—determined to emulate the gayest places of public amusement in France or Germany. Restaurants, cafés, dancing-rooms—and oh!—shall we say it—a touch of Cremorne! In one panel you see a figure of _Watchfulness_, typified by a robed lady, with a wise-faced owl at her side. The river Severn is typified by Naïads and a dolphin—by a little poetic licence. In another panel we have _Charity_, bearing a couple of children, with a figure of old Father Thames sitting among rushes below. Then, we have _Perseverance_ for the Avon, emblemed by a snail at the foot of a brunette lady with black eyes,—the favourite style of beauty of the artist, Mr. Sang. The Trent and the Tyne are similarly illustrated, and all in the brightest colours, on a light ground.

Let us now return to the principal entrance, and ascend to the first gallery. The panels all round, are painted as below. The chief subject of most of them appears to be a colliery—that is, the works above ground, such as the little black house of the steam-engine, with its long chain passing over the drum, and then over a wheel above the pit’s mouth. The first we come to is the celebrated Wallsend colliery. Each has fanciful designs above and beneath, as if to atone for the dark reality of the centre piece, picturesque as this is always made. Over some of these we find heraldic monsters of the right frightful Order of the Griffin, prancing above greyhounds who crouch on each side of a large ornamental cup, not unlike a head-dress of the ancient South American Indians, which however is supported by a lady in the bright costume of a Mexican peasant, wearing wings. Beneath there lies a rich grouping of grapes, arborescent ferns, with vulture-headed griffins, and flowers of the cactus. The collieries are occasionally varied with a sea-piece, in which, of course, a black collier-vessel is sailing from the North. Sometimes the scene is a shore-piece with a collier boat; but presided over by the usual sort of nut-brown mining beauty with Italian eyes, and hair in no particular order, bearing a fruit-basket on her head, piled up with all sorts of ripe fruit of the most tempting size and colour. Beneath her, we again find the griffin vultures holding watch over some logs of antediluvian trees.

Wandering onwards in this way, we observed, a little in advance of us, a seafaring man, in a rough blue pilot coat, with a face so weather-beaten that it looked as hard as a ship’s figure-head, and a pair of great dangling hands that seemed hewn out of solid oak. He was very busy in front of one of the panels, admiring a lady with very good-humoured black eyes, and cheeks as red as ripe tomatos, carrying on her head a basket of Orlean plums and alligator pears, richly grouped with a profusion of grapes, and crimson flowers of the cactus. Her face was turned smilingly upwards at a collier brig in full sail.

We congratulated him on his ‘choice,’ and the suggestion appearing to please his fancy, a little colloquy ensued, from which it turned out that he was Thomas Oldcastle, of Durham, captain of the collier brig ‘Shiner,’ of South Shields, and having just discharged his cargo at Rotherhithe, had come to London to amuse himself for a few hours. Arriving at the entrance in the course of our talk, we ascended the stairs together, and soon reached the second gallery.

The flooring of this gallery—in fact the whole of it, like the previous one, was of cast iron. In the semicircle of the entrance was a picture of Newcastle, on one side, with its iron bridge and railway combined, and its old stone bridge below. It was very well and characteristically painted, and of a sombre and rather smoky colour, which Captain Oldcastle said was too like to be very pleasing. His thoughts were evidently reverting to the very highly coloured operatic ladies below. On the other side of this entrance was a picture of Durham, with the cathedral among the trees—also a very good and truthful picture. Captain Oldcastle, after great deliberation, and the slow pocketing of both hands, was obliged to confess that it was something like the old place. But this wall was not right—any how—and that spire did not look so—when last he saw it—in short, it was clear he wanted reality, could not make out perspective differences, and preferred the handsome looks of the brunette fruit-bearer in the lower gallery.

But though our honest friend had no good taste in pictures, there was a great mass of good solid practical knowledge in the hard-outlined head of this rough captain of the North Sea. It turned out that he was an old friend of Mr. Buddle, the coal engineer of Wallsend, and often quoted him as authority. Chancing to ask him some question about the number of people employed in the coal trade on the Tyne and the Wear, he said that he had heard Buddle say (twenty years ago) there were nearly 5,000 boys, and quite 3,500 men _underground_ in the works near the Tyne: and nearly 3,000 men, and 700 boys above ground. On the Wear, he said there were 9,000. All of these were employed in the mines, and taking the coal to the ships on the two rivers. Captain Oldcastle estimated the vessels employed at about 1,400, which would require 15,000 sailors and boys to work them “as all ought to be.” Besides these, there were lots more hands in other parts of the great coal trade of the north.

But as this estimate of his friend Buddle, we remarked, had been made twenty years ago, was it not pretty certain that the numbers had immensely increased by this time? To this the Captain replied that it was so, no doubt; and supposing that every other district, besides the North, of the entire coal trade of England, had increased in the same proportion, and if you added to this all the agents, factors, clerks, subordinates, whippers, lightermen, wharfingers, &c., there would be found upwards of 200,000 men engaged in the Coal trade of England,—enough, he added with a grimly comical look, if a war broke out, to furnish the army and navy with 20,000 men each, at a week’s notice.

“If they liked the work,” we added; but the Captain had walked on, attracted by a picture in one of the panels. It was a portrait of a miner in his underground dress—when he wears any—the darkness of his figure and position in the mine being pleasantly and appropriately relieved by an immense quantity of highly coloured _tropical_ fruits, flowers, griffin vultures, long and sleek-necked cranes, arborescent ferns, various logs of wood known in fossil botany, with here and there a string of choice jewels,—rubies, emeralds, and carbuncles of prodigious size, such as one has seen in “Blue Beard” and “Pizarro.” The next figure was a miner with a Davy-lamp, whom Captain Oldcastle shrewdly conjectured to be looking out for some of those jewels so profusely accorded to the fortunate miner in the previous picture.

In walking round these galleries, amidst so many adornments attracting the attention, a visitor might be excused for not too hastily turning his thoughts to utility. But this thought, in these too practical days, will obtrude itself. The number of the private rooms for offices, on each gallery, is considerable; their accommodations, all that could be desired; their appearance most neat, quiet, and unexceptionable; but by far the greater part are _empty_. Nobody will take them. Many of those on the ground-floor, or area of the market—obviously the best place by far—are unlet. These are of the high-priced, of course; still, as the price decreases with the ascent, why are not more of the upper offices taken? Here—in the very centre of all the great Coal trade of England!—and not one-third, not one-fourth, we think, of the offices let? We expressed our astonishment to the Captain.

“Oh!” said he, “the City is a queer place, and the City authorities are a rum sort of reasoners. They asked too much rent for these berths at first; and though but a few factors and merchants can afford to give it, the City still persists. And so they are obliged to go to the expence of fires in all the empty offices to keep them aired three-quarters of the year round, rather than see the place full at a moderate rent. That’s how I read their log.”

We now ascended to the third gallery. Here, the cold, though not the “beggarly array of empty boxes,” was most expressive of the mismanagement, _somehow_ and _somewhere_ of this well-placed, and most commodious building, on which so much money has been expended.

The paintings in the entrance of this uppermost gallery were of ‘Shields’ on one side, and ‘Sunderland’ on the other. That of Shields was a view of colliers in the river by moonlight, with a dull sky of indigo blue, and smoky clouds—very well done, and truthful, having a sufficient mixture of reality for the nature of the subject, and of fancy for the picturesque. The picture of Sunderland, with its one-arched iron bridge, which is so high above the water, that a collier can pass underneath without striking her topmasts, is also a night scene; but by torch-light; the red flashes of which fall upon a train of little upright waggons full of coals, coming from the pit to be shipped.

The panels round this gallery are adorned with paintings of gigantic ferns, fragments of the trunks of the lepidodendron, and the sigillaria, and other stems and foliage of those antediluvian plants and trees which subsequently contributed most largely to the coal formations. These paintings are interspersed with various miners’ tools, above which rises the glass dome of the building.

Descending the well-staircase, we asked Captain Oldcastle what capital he thought was employed by the great coal owners on the Tyne and Wear. He said—quoting his friend Buddle again, as authority—that they could not have embarked less than a million and a half of money, without reckoning any of the vessels on the river; but taking these into the account, the capital employed would not amount to less than between eight and ten millions. And this estimate was made by Buddle twenty years ago!

THE GREAT PENAL EXPERIMENTS.

Prison Life, like life in all other circumstances, has its extremes; and these have been pushed to the farthest verge of contrast by the ‘great experiments’ that have lately been essayed. There is an aristocracy of prisoners, and a commonality of prisoners; there are palace prisons, and kennel prisons in which it would be cruelty to confine refractory dogs. We have hardened criminals put into training in Model Prisons for pattern penitence, and novices in crime thrust into dens with the most depraved felons; so as to bring them down in morals to the lowest practicable level. The study of some of these extremes is instructive. It shows what results have been produced by the ‘great experiments’ which have been tried; either how much reform they have effected; or how many misdemeanants they are likely to add to the already over-populated dangerous class. For the sake of impartiality we shall in each instance offer no description of our own; but we intend to cite what has already been in print.

A graphic but eccentric pen has supplied a vivid description of the palace order of gaols. “Some months ago,” says Mr. Carlyle, in a recent pamphlet, “some friends took me with them to see one of the London Prisons; a Prison of the exemplary or model kind. An immense circuit of buildings; cut out, girt with a high ring wall, from the lanes and streets of the quarter, which is a dim and crowded one. Gateway as to a fortified place; then a spacious court, like the square of a city; broad staircases, passages to interior courts; fronts of stately architecture all round. It lodges some Thousand or Twelve-hundred prisoners, besides the officers of the establishment. Surely one of the most perfect buildings, within the compass of London. We looked at the apartments, sleeping-cells, dining-rooms, working-rooms, general courts or special and private; excellent all, the ne-plus-ultra of human care and ingenuity; in my life I never saw so clean a building; probably no Duke in England lives in a mansion of such perfect and thorough cleanness. The bread, the cocoa, soup, meat, all the various sorts of food, in their respective cooking-places, we tasted; found them of excellence superlative. The prisoners sat at work, light work, picking oakum and the like, in airy apartments with glass roofs, of agreeable temperature and perfect ventilation; silent, or at least conversing only by secret signs; others were out, taking their hour of promenade in clean flagged courts; methodic composure, cleanliness, peace, substantial wholesome comfort, reigned everywhere supreme.”

This is the great model experiment. We can easily reverse the picture. It is but a short walk from Pentonville to Smithfield—scarcely two miles—yet, in the prison world, the two places are antipodes. Here, within the hallowed precincts of the City, stands Giltspur Street Compter, upon the state of which we produce another witness. Mr. Dixon, in his work on London Prisons, testifies that in this jail the prisoners “sleep in small cells, little more than half the size of the model cell at Pentonville, which is calculated (on the supposition that the cell is to be ventilated on the best plan which science can suggest, regardless of cost) to be just large enough for _one_ inmate. The cell in Giltspur Street Compter is little more than half the size, and is either not ventilated at all, or is ventilated very imperfectly. I have measured it, and know exactly the quantity of air which it will hold, and have no doubt but that it contains less than any human being ought to breathe in, in the course of a night. Well, in this cell, in which there is hardly room for them to lie down, I have seen _five_ persons locked up, at four o’clock in the day, to be there confined, in darkness, in idleness, to pass all those hours, to do all the offices of nature, not merely in each other’s presence, but crushed by the narrowness of their den into a state of filthy contact which brute beasts would have resisted to the last gasp of life! Think of these five wretched beings—men with souls, and gifted with human reason—condemned, day by day, to pass in this unutterably loathsome manner two-thirds of their time! Can we wonder if these men come out of prison, after three or four months of such treatment, prepared to commit the most revolting crimes? Could five of the purest men in the world live together in such a manner without losing every attribute of good which had once belonged to them? He would be a rash man who would dare to answer—‘Yes.’ Take another fact from Newgate. In any of the female wards may be seen, a week before the Sessions, a collection of persons of every shade of guilt, and some who are innocent. I remember one case particularly. A servant girl, of about sixteen, a fresh-looking healthy creature, recently up from the country, was charged by her mistress for stealing a brooch. She was in the same room—lived all day, slept all night—with the most abandoned of her sex. They were left alone; they had no work to do; no books—except a few tracts for which they had no taste—to read. The whole day was spent, as is usual in such prisons, in telling stories—the gross and guilty stories of their own lives. There is no form of wickedness, no aspect of vice, with which the poor creature’s mind would not be compelled to grow familiar in the few weeks she passed in Newgate awaiting trial. When the day came, the evidence against her was found to be the lamest in the world, and she was at once acquitted. That she entered Newgate innocent I have no doubt; but who shall answer for the state in which she left it?”

Let us not wrong the City in supposing it singular in promoting these loathsome prison scenes. A hundred passages, in nearly as many blue books, are ready for quotation, to show how some of the ‘great experiments’ in not a few of the National prisons have turned out. One, however, will do. Here is a sentence or two from the Government’s own report of the state of one of its own hulks at Woolwich—the same Government which has been so good as to dispense upwards of 90,000_l._ of the public money in building the Pentonville Model. We cannot quote it entire, by reason of some of the passages being too revolting for reproduction in these pages:—

“In the hospital ship, the “Unité,” the great majority of the patients were infested with vermin, and their persons in many instances, particularly their feet, begrimed with dirt. No regular supply of body linen had been issued; so much so, that many men had been five weeks without a change; and all record had been lost of the time when the blankets had been washed; and the number of sheets was so insufficient, that the expedient had to be resorted to of only a single sheet at a time to save appearances. Neither towels nor combs were provided for the prisoners’ use. * * * On the admission of new cases into the hospital, patients were directed to leave their beds and go into hammocks, and the new cases were turned into the vacated beds, without changing the sheets.”

Is anything more shocking than the Compter, Newgate, and the Unité to be conceived? Do travellers tell us of anything worse in Russia, or China, or Old Tartary? “O! yes; there is Austria and its life-punishments in Spielberg,” some one may suggest, “surely there is no London parallel for that.” But Mr. Dixon answers there is:—in the Millbank Penitentiary. ‘The dark cells,’ he says, ‘are fearful places, and sometimes melancholy mistakes are made in committing persons to them. You descend about twenty steps from the ground-floor into a very dark passage leading into a corridor, on one side of which the cells—small, dark, ill-ventilated, and doubly barred—are ranged. No glimpse of day ever comes into this fearful place. The offender is locked up for three days, and fed on bread and water only. There is only a board to sleep on; and the only furniture of the cell is a water-closet. On a former visit to Millbank, some months ago, I was told there was a person in one of these cells. “He is touched, poor fellow!” said the warden, “in his intellects.” But his madness was very mild. He wished to fraternise with the other prisoners; declared that all mankind are brethren; sang hymns when told to be silent; and when reprimanded for taking these unwarranted liberties, declared that he was the “governor.” They said he _pretended_ to be mad; which, seeing that his vagaries subjected him to continual punishments, and procured him no advantages, was very likely! They put him into darkness to enlighten his understanding; and alone, to teach him how unbrotherly men are. Poor wretch! He was frightened with his solitude, and howled fearfully. I shall never forget his wail as we passed the door of his horrid dungeon. The tones were quite unearthly, and caused an involuntary shudder. On hearing footsteps, he evidently thought they were coming to release him. While we remained in the corridor, he did not cease to shout and implore most lamentably for freedom: when he heard us retreating, his voice rose into a yell; and when the fall of the heavy bolts told him that we were gone, he gave a shriek of horror, agony, and despair, which ran through the pentagon, and can never be forgotten. God grant that I may never hear such sounds again! On coming again, after three or four months’ absence, to this part of the prison, the inquiry naturally arose, “What has become of the man who _pretended_ to be mad?” The answer was, “Oh, he went mad, and was sent to Bedlam!”’

What happens at Pentonville, and what takes place at Millbank, is done under the same eye, under the same legislative supervision. The two “great experiments” of iron and feather-bed prison reform are worked out by the same power. The despots of Russia, Austria, and China, are at least consistent. They have not carried on opposite systems—one of extreme severity, and another of superlative ‘coddling.’ In no other country but this does Justice—blind as she is—administer cocoa and condign misery to the same degree of crime with the same hand.

We have thrown these facts together, merely to awaken attention to them. We purposely abstain from suggestive comment. We know that the subject of reformatory punishment is fraught with difficulties, to conquer which all the “great experiments” have been tried. But they have only been “great” because of their great expense and their great failure; and when the failure is incontestable—proved beyond doubt by the direst results,—should they not be abandoned, and something else tried, instead of being made an absolute matter of faith, and a test to which certain county magistrates, whom we could name, bring every man who is unhappy enough to be within their power? The cause of it is plainly and constantly presented at the bar of every Police Court and in the dock of every Sessions House. It has resulted from an utter misapprehension of means to end, and a lofty disregard of the good old adage, “prevention is better than cure.” Although it has been daily observed that ignorance—moral more than intellectual—ignorance has been the forerunner of all juvenile crime, we have never tried any very great experiment upon _that_. On the contrary, we spend hundreds of thousands every year to effect the manifest impossibility of re-forming what has never been formed. We have tried every shade of system but the right. Ingenuity has been on the rack to invent every sort of reformatory, from the iron rule of Millbank, to the affectionate fattening at Pentonville—except one, and that happens to be the right one. Punishment has occupied all our thoughts,—training, none. We condemn young criminals for not knowing certain moralities which we have not taught them, and—by herding them with accomplished professors of dishonesty in transit jails—punish them for immoralities which have been there taught them. Instances of this can be adduced in so large a proportion as to amount to a rule; to which the appearance of instructed juvenile criminals at the tribunals is the exception. Two or three glaring cases occurred only the past month. We select one as reported in the “Globe” newspaper of Tuesday, May 7:—

‘BOW-STREET POLICE-COURT.—This day, two little children, whose heads hardly reached the top of the dock, were placed at the bar before Mr. Jardine, charged with stealing a loaf. Their very appearance told the want they were in. The housekeeper to Mr. Mims, baker, Drury Lane, deposed, that they, about eight o’clock last evening, went into the shop and asked for a quartern loaf, and while her back was turned to get it for them, they stole a half quartern loaf, value 2½_d._, which was lying on the counter, and made off with it. Police constable, F 14, deposed, that he was on duty in Drury Lane, and seeing them quarrelling over the loaf, he asked them where they had got it. One of them answered, they had stolen it. After ascertaining how they came by it, he took them into custody. In defence, the prisoners said they were starving. Mr. Jardine sentenced them both to be once whipped in the House of Correction.’

These children were without means, friends, or any sort of instruction. They were whipped then for their ignorance and want, for both which they are not responsible. After whipping and a few imprisonments they will doubtless be boarded and instructed by fellow prisoners into finished thieves. The authorities tell us, that five-eighths of the juvenile criminals—and a few become professional after the age of twenty—who are received into jails, have not received one spark of moral or intellectual training!

These, and a thousand other facts too obvious for the common sense of our readers to be troubled with, induce us to recommend one other ‘great experiment’ which has never yet been tried. It has the advantage of being a preventive as well as a cure—it is—compared with all the penal systems now in practice—immeasurably safer, more humane, and incalculably cheaper. The ‘great experiment’ we propose, is NATIONAL EDUCATION.

THE ORPHAN’S VOYAGE HOME.

The men could hardly keep the deck, So bitter was the night; Keen north-east winds sang thro’ the shrouds, The deck was frosty white; While overhead the glistening stars Put forth their points of light.

On deck, behind a bale of goods, Two orphans crouch’d, to sleep; But ’twas so cold, the youngest boy In vain tried not to weep: They were so poor, they had no right Near cabin doors to creep.

The elder round the younger wrapt His little ragged cloak, To shield him from the freezing sleet, And surf that o’er them broke; Then drew him closer to his side, And softly to him spoke:—

“The night will not be long”—he said, “And if the cold winds blow, We shall the sooner reach our home, And see the peat-fire glow; But now the stars are beautiful— Oh, do not tremble so!

“Come closer!—sleep—forget the frost— Think of the morning red— Our father and our mother soon Will take us to their bed; And in their warm arms we shall sleep.” He knew not they were dead.

For them no father to the ship Shall with the morning come; For them no mother’s loving arms Are spread to take them home: Meanwhile the cabin passengers In dreams of pleasure roam.

At length the orphans sank to sleep All on the freezing deck; Close huddled side to side—each arm Clasp’d round the other’s neck. With heads bent down, they dream’d the earth Was fading to a speck.

The steerage passengers have all Been taken down below, And round the stove they warm their limbs Into a drowsy glow; And soon within their berths forget The icy wind and snow.

Now morning dawns: the land in sight, Smiles beam on every face! The pale and qualmy passengers Begin the deck to pace, Seeking along the sun-lit cliffs Some well-known spot to trace.

Only the orphans do not stir, Of all this bustling train: They reach’d their _home_ this starry night! They will not stir again! The winter’s breath proved kind to them, And ended all their pain.

But in their deep and freezing sleep Clasp’d rigid to each other, In dreams they cried, “The bright morn breaks, Home! home! is here, my brother! The Angel Death has been our friend— We come! dear Father! Mother!”

ILLUSTRATIONS OF CHEAPNESS.

TEA.

The history of tea, from its first introduction to England, may be read in the history of taxation. It appears to have escaped the notice of nearly all writers on tea, that the first tax is a curious illustration of the original mode of its sale. By the act of the 22d and 23d Charles II., 1670–1, a duty of eighteenpence was imposed upon ‘every _gallon_ of chocolate, sherbet, and tea, made and sold, to be paid by the makers thereof.’ It is manifest that such a tax was impossible to be collected without constant evasion; and so, after having remained on the Statute Book for seventeen years, it was discovered, in 1688, that ‘the collecting of the duty by way of Excise upon the liquors of coffee, chocolate, and tea, is not only very troublesome and unequal upon the retailers of these liquors, but requireth such attendance of officers as makes the neat receipt very inconsiderable.’ The excise upon the liquor was therefore repealed, and heavy Customs’ duties imposed on the imported tea.

The annals of tea may be divided into epochs. The first is that in which the liquid only was taxed, which tax commenced about ten years after we have any distinct record of the public or private use of tea. In 1660, dear old Pepys writes, ‘I did send for a cup of tea (a China drink) of which I never had drank before.’ In 1667, the herb had found its way into his own house: ‘Home, and there find my wife making of tea; a drink which Mr. Pelling, the Potticary, tells her is good for her cold and defluxions.’

Mrs. Pepys making her first cup of tea is a subject to be painted. How carefully she metes out the grains of the precious drug, which Mr. Pelling, the Potticary, has sold her at a most enormous price—a crown an ounce at the very least. She has tasted the liquor once before: but then there was sugar in the infusion—a beverage only for the highest. If tea should become fashionable, it will cost in housekeeping as much as their claret. However, Pepys says, the price is coming down; and he produces the handbill of Thomas Garway, in Exchange Alley, which the lady peruses with great satisfaction; for the worthy merchant says, that although ‘tea in England hath been sold in the leaf for six pounds, and sometimes for ten pounds the pound weight,’ he ‘by continued care and industry in obtaining the best tea,’ now ‘sells tea for 16_s._ to 50_s._ a pound.’ Garway not only sells tea in the leaf, but ‘many noblemen, physicians, merchants, &c., daily resort to his house to drink the drink thereof.’ The coffee-houses soon ran away with the tea-merchant’s liquid customers. They sprang up all over London; they became a fashion at the Universities. Coffee and tea came into England as twin-brothers. Like many other foreigners, they received a full share of abuse and persecution from the people and the state. Coffee was denounced as ‘hell broth,’ and tea as ‘poison.’ But the coffee-houses became fashionable at once; and for a century were the exclusive resorts of wits and politicians. ‘Here,’ says a pamphleteer of 1673, ‘haberdashers of political small wares meet, and mutually abuse each other and the public, with bottomless stories and headless notions.’ Clarendon, in 1666, proposed, either to suppress them, or to employ spies to note down the conversation. In 1670 the liquids sold at the coffee-houses were to be taxed. We can scarcely imagine a state of society in which the excise officer was superintending the preparation of a gallon of tea, and charging his eightpence. The exciseman and the spy were probably united in the same person. During this period we may be quite certain that tea was unknown, as a general article of diet, in the private houses even of the wealthiest. But it was not taxation which then kept it out of use. The drinkers of tea were ridiculed by the wits, and frightened by the physicians. More than all, a new habit had to be acquired. The praise of Boyle was nothing against the ancient influences of ale and claret. It was then a help to excess instead of a preventive. A writer in 1682 says,—‘I know some that celebrate good Thee for preventing drunkenness, taking it before they go to the tavern, and use it very much also after a debauch.’ One of the first attractions of ‘the cup which cheers but not inebriates’ was as a minister of evil.

The second epoch of tea was that of excessive taxation; which lasted from the five shillings Customs’ duty of 1688 to 1745, more than half a century, in which fiscal folly and prohibition were almost convertible terms. Yet tea gradually forced its way into domestic use. In a Tatler of 1710 we read ‘I am credibly informed, by an antiquary who has searched the registers in which the bills of fare of the court are recorded, that instead of tea and bread and butter, which have prevailed of late years, the maids of honour in Queen Elizabeth’s time were allowed three rumps of beef for their breakfast.’ Tea for breakfast must have been expensive in 1710. In the original edition of the Tatler, we have many advertisements about tea, one of which we copy:—

_From the Tatler of October 10, 1710._

“Mr. Fary’s 16_s._ Bohee Tea, not much inferior in goodness to the best Foreign Bohee Tea, is sold by himself only at the Bell in Gracechurch Street. Note,—the best Foreign Bohee is worth 30_s._ a pound; so that what is sold at 20_s._ or 21_s._ must either be faulty Tea, or mixed with a proportionate quantity of damaged Green or Bohee, the worst of which will remain black after infusion.”

‘Mr. Fary’s 16_s._ Bohee Tea, not much inferior in goodness to the best Foreign Bohee Tea’ was, upon the face of it, an indigenous manufacture. ‘The best Foreign Bohee is worth 30_s._ a pound.’ With such Queen Anne refreshed herself at Hampton Court:

‘Here thou, great Anna, whom three realms obey, Dost sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tea.’

When the best tea was at 30_s._ a pound, the home consumption of tea was about a hundred and forty thousand pounds per annum. A quarter of a century later, in the early tea-drinking days of Dr. Johnson, the consumption had quadrupled. And yet tea was then so dear, that Garrick was cross even with his favourite actress for using it too freely. ‘I remember,’ says Johnson, ‘drinking tea with him long ago, when Peg Woffington made it, and he grumbled at her for making it too strong. He had then begun to feel money in his purse, and did not know when he should have enough of it.’ In 1745, the last year of the second tea epoch, the consumption was only seven hundred and thirty thousand pounds per annum. Yet even at this period tea was forcing itself into common use. Duncan Forbes, in his Correspondence, which ranges from 1715 to 1748, is bitter against ‘the excessive use of tea; which is now become so common, that the meanest families, even of labouring people, particularly in boroughs, make their morning’s meal of it, and thereby wholly disuse the ale, which heretofore was their accustomed drink; and the same drug supplies all the labouring women with their afternoon’s entertainments, to the exclusion of the twopenny.’ The excellent President of the Court of Session had his prejudices; and he was frightened at the notion that tea was driving out beer; and thus, diminishing the use of malt, was to be the ruin of agriculture. Some one gave the Government of the day wiser counsel than that of prohibitory duties, which he desired.

In 1745, the quantity of tea retained for home consumption was 730,729 lbs. In 1746, it amounted to 2,358,589 lbs. The consumption was trebled. The duty had been reduced, in 1745, from 4_s._ per lb. to 1_s._ per lb., and 25 per cent. on the gross price. For forty years afterwards, the Legislature contrived to keep the consumption pretty equal with the increase of the population, putting on a little more duty when the demand seemed a little increasing. These were the palmy days of Dr. Johnson’s tea triumphs—the days in which he describes himself as ‘a hardened and shameless tea drinker, who has for many years diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant; whose kettle has scarcely time to cool; who with tea amuses the evenings; with tea solaces the midnights; and with tea welcomes the morning.’ This was the third epoch—that of considerable taxation, enhancing the monopoly price of an article, sold to the people at exorbitant profits.

In 1785, the Government boldly repealed the Excise duty; and imposed only a Customs’ duty of 12½ per cent. The consumption of tea was doubled in the first year after the change, and quadrupled in the third. The system was too good to last. The concession of three years in which the public might freely use an article of comfort was quite enough for official liberality and wisdom. New duties were imposed in 1787; the consumption was again driven back, and by additional duty upon duty, was kept far behind the increase of the population for another thirty years. In 1784, the annual consumption was only 4,948,983 lbs.; in 1787, with a reduced duty, it was 17,047,054 lbs.; in 1807, when we had almost reached the climax of high duties, it was only 19,239,212 lbs. This state of things, with very slight alteration, continued till the peace. The consumption had been nearly stationary for thirty years, with a duty raised from 12½ per cent. to 96 per cent. Those were the days, which some of us may remember, when we paid 12_s._ a pound for our green tea, and 8_s._ for our black; the days when convictions for the sale of spurious tea were of constant occurrence; and yet the days when Cobbett was alarmed lest tea should become a common beverage, and calculated that between eleven and twelve pounds a year were consumed by a cottager’s family in tea-drinking. During this fourth epoch of excessive taxation, the habit of tea-drinking had become so rooted in the people, that no efforts of the Government could destroy it. The teas under 2_s._ 6_d._ a pound (the Company’s warehouse prices without duty), were the teas of the working classes—the teas of the cottage and the kitchen. In 1801, such teas paid only an excise of 15 per cent.; in 1803, they paid 60 per cent.; in 1806, 90 per cent. And yet the washerwoman looked to her afternoon ‘dish of tea,’ as something that might make her comfortable after her twelve hours’ labour; and balancing her saucer on a tripod of three fingers, breathed a joy beyond utterance as she cooled the draught. The factory workman then looked forward to the singing of the kettle, as some compensation for the din of the spindle. Tea had found its way even to the hearth of the agricultural labourer. He ‘had lost his rye teeth’—to use his own expression for his preference of wheaten bread—and he would have his ounce of tea as well as the best of his neighbours. Sad stuff the chandler’s shop furnished him: no commodity brought hundreds of miles from the interior of China, chiefly by human labour; shipped according to the most expensive arrangements; sold under a limited competition at the dearest rate; and taxed as highly as its wholesale cost. The small tea-dealers had their manufactured tea. But they had also their smuggled tea. The pound of tea which sold for eight shillings in England, was selling at Hamburg for fourteenpence. It was hard indeed if the artisan did not occasionally obtain a cup of good tea at a somewhat lower price than the King and John Company had willed. No dealer could send out six pounds of tea without a permit. Excisemen were issuing permits and examining permits all over the kingdom. But six hundred per cent. profit was too much for the weakness of human nature and the power of the exciseman.

From the peace, to the opening of the China tea-trade in 1833, and the repeal of the excise duty in 1834, there was a considerable increase in the consumption of tea, but not an increase at all comparable to the increase since 1834. We consumed ten million pounds more tea in 1833 than in 1816, a period of sixteen years; we consumed in 1848, a period of fifteen years, seventeen million pounds more than in 1833. In 1848 we retained for home consumption, 48,735,791 pounds. It is this present period of large consumption which forms the fifth epoch.

The present duty on tea is 2_s._ 2¼_d._ a pound. The experienced housewife knows where to buy excellent tea at 4_s._ a pound. But there are shops in London where tea may be bought at 3_s._, and 3_s._ 4_d._ a pound. Such low priced teas are used more freely than ever by the hard-working poor. The duty is now unvarying, but enormously high. It is unnecessary to assume that the cheap teas are now adulterated teas. In the London Price Currents of the present May, there are several sorts of tea as low as 8_d._ per pound, wholesale without duty. The finer teas vary from 1_s._ to 2_s._ In 1833, previous to the opening of the China trade, the price of Congou tea in the Company’s warehouses ranged from 2_s._ to 3_s._ per pound; in 1850 the lowest current price was 9_d._, the highest 1_s._ 4_d._ In 1833, the Company’s price of Hyson tea varied from 3_s._ to 5_s._ 6_d._; in 1850, the lowest current price was 1_s._ 2_d._, the highest 3_s._ 4_d._

With the amount of duty on tea twice as high in 1850 as in 1833, how is it that tea may be universally bought at one half of the price of 1833? How is it that an article which yields five millions of revenue has become so cheap that it is now scarcely a luxury? Before we answer this, let us explain why we say that the duty is twice as high now as in 1833. Before the opening of the China trade tea was taxed under the Excise at an ad-valorem duty of ninety-six per cent. on one sort, and one hundred per cent. on another, which gave an average of about half-a-crown a pound. Those who resisted the destruction of the Company’s monopoly predicted that the supply would fall off under the open trade; that the Chinese would not deal with private merchants; that the market for tea in China was a limited one; that tea would become scarcer and dearer. The Government knew better than this. It repealed the Excise duty with all its cumbrous machinery of permits; and it imposed a Customs’ duty _at per pound_, which exists now, as it did in 1836, with the addition of five per cent. Had the duty of 1833 been continued,—the hundred per cent duty—the great bulk of tea, which is sold at an average of a shilling a pound would have been only taxed a shilling a pound; it is now taxed 2_s._ 2¼_d._ By a side-wind, the Government, with what some persons may call financial foresight, doubled the tax upon the humbler consumers. But it may be fairly questioned whether, if the tax of 1833 had continued, the Government would not have secured as much revenue by the poor doubling their consumption of tea. The demand for no article of general use is so fluctuating as that for tea. In seasons of prosperity, the consumption rises several millions of pounds above the average; in times of depression it falls as much below. Tea is the barometer of the poor man’s command of something more than bread. With a tax of 2_s._ 2¼_d._ a pound, it is clear that if sound commercial principles, improved navigation, wholesale competition, and moderate retail profits, had not found their way into the tea-trade, since the abolition of the monopoly in 1833, the revenue upon tea would have been stationary, instead of having increased a million and a half. All the manifold causes that produce commercial cheapness in general—science, careful employment of capital in profitable exchange, certainty and rapidity of communication, extension of the market—have been especially working to make tea cheap. Tea is more and more becoming a necessary of life to all classes. Tea was denounced first as a poison, and then as an extravagance. Cobbett was furious against it. An Edinburgh Reviewer of 1823, keeps no terms with its use by the poor: ‘We venture to assert, that when a labourer fancies himself refreshed with a mess of this stuff, sweetened by the coarsest black sugar, and with azure blue milk, it is only the warmth of the water that soothes him for the moment; unless, perhaps, the sweetness may be palatable also.’ It is dangerous even for great reviewers to ‘venture to assert.’ In a few years after comes Liebig, with his chemical discoveries; and demonstrates that coffee and tea have become necessaries of life to whole nations, by the presence of one and the same substance in both vegetables, which has a peculiar effect upon the animal system; that they were both originally met with amongst nations whose diet is chiefly vegetable; and, by contributing to the formation of bile, their peculiar function, have become a substitute for animal food to a large class of the population whose consumption of meat is very limited, and to another large class who are unable to take regular exercise.

Tea and coffee, then, are more especially essential to the poor. They supply a void which the pinched labourer cannot so readily fill up with weak and sour ale; they are substitutes for the country walk to the factory girl, or the seamstress in a garret. They are ministers to temperance; they are home comforts. Mrs. Piozzi making tea for Dr. Johnson till four o’clock in the morning, and listening contentedly to his wondrous talk, is a pleasant anecdote of the first century of tea; the artisan’s wife, lingering over the last evening cup, while her husband reads his newspaper or his book, is something higher, which belongs to our own times.

THE SICKNESS AND HEALTH OF THE PEOPLE OF BLEABURN.

IN THREE PARTS.—CHAPTER VI.

The new clergyman was, as the landlord had supposed he would be, a very different person from Mr. Finch. If he had not been a fearless man, he would not have come: much less would he have brought his wife, which he