The time may be far distant when the great bulk of this population will adopt Tea as an ordinary beverage; but the way in which the habit of using it has spread during the last ten or fifteen years, among all classes of the vast population of Calcutta, affords an indication of possibilities very well worth testing.
When last in India I wrote on this subject largely, but all to no avail. The following was one of my letters which appeared in the Tea Gazette:—
The Market at our Doors.—Consumption of China Tea in India.
The Statesman, in a recent article, observes as follows, while discussing the maritime trade of British India:—
“Perhaps the most anomalous import we have is Tea. It is hardly conceivable that while Indian Tea continues to advance in public estimation at home, we should not only use China Tea in India, but that in increasing quantities.”[93]
In 1876-77 the imports of China Teas were a little under two millions, but in 1880-81 as much over three millions! The Statesman states, and truly, that the reason of this is simply “that Indian Tea is sold in too large packets to be easily obtainable by the general public, for it seems, as regards Indian Tea, the smallest quantity that can be bought is one pound, whereas an ounce of China Tea can be purchased.”
Further on, the Statesman kindly alludes to my advocacy in the Tea Gazette of a company to sell Tea in small packages to the natives, stating also that such a trade is “capable of almost unlimited expansion at a fair profit,” which is exactly what I have, for some time, been trying to hammer into the heads of those interested in the Tea industry of India.
Now, Sir, is it not absurd that while the bête noir of our industry is “supply in excess of demand,” and while, with this dread, we are trying (it seems with success) to open up new markets at the Antipodes and in America, we are neglecting a market at our very doors, the limits of which, I hold, no man can foresee, for is it not a market where the possible buyers number 200 millions?
Is it not also more than absurd, nay a very shame to those interested in our industry, that while we have a better article than China Tea, we allow, by our supineness and lack of enterprise, more than three million pounds of an inferior article to be sold in the birth place of the better? And why? simply because we will not supply it in the form the teeming crowd of natives willing, nay anxious, to buy can avail themselves of it!
Since I advocated in your paper the formation of a company to sell Tea to natives in small packets, and showed, I thought conclusively: 1—That the capital required was not large (say one and a-half lakhs). 2—That the shareholders might expect very fair dividends. 3—That there was no assignable limit to the trade which might be developed. 4—That if such a company was started and worked well, all fear for the future of Indian Tea would be at an end. 5—That every Tea owner, who became a shareholder, would advance his own interests by many times more than the dividends he would receive—since then I have obtained from England estimates of all the machinery required to bulk and pack the Teas, advice from the best firms as to the mode so successful in England, and I am more than ever convinced that the company would be a money-making one, and that, in two words, we shall sadly neglect our own interests if we do not accomplish it.