These effects are not to be attributed so much to the peculiar properties of this costly vegetable, as to the want of proper food, which the expence of the former deprived these poor people from procuring. I knew a family, confiding of a mother and several children, whose fondness for Tea was so great, that three times a day, as often as their meals, which generally confided of the same articles, they regularly sent for Tea and sugar, with a morsel of bread to support nature; by which practice, and the want of a due quantity of nutritious food, they grew more enfeebled; thin, emaciated habits and weak constitutions characterised this distressed family, till some of the children were removed from this baneful nursery, by which they acquired tolerable health.
My valuable friend, Dr. Walker, of Leeds, in Yorkshire, has noticed, in several parts of that extensive and commercial county, and particularly in Leeds; that, “since the more plentiful introduction of Tea into the families of the industrious poor, by the late reduction of its price, the Atrophia Lactantium, or Tabes Nutricum, a species of decline, has made an unusually rapid progress. The difficulty with which animal food is procured by the lower ranks of society, in quantity sufficient for daily nutriment, has led many of them to substitute, in the place of more wholesome provisions, a cheap infusion of this foreign vegetable, whose grateful flavour (and perhaps narcotic quality, which it possesses in a small degree in common with most other ever-greens) is found to create an appetite for itself, in preference to all other kinds of aliment that the scanty income of poverty allows these deluded objects to procure; though I am sorry to have occasion to add, that the lowering effects of tea-drinking lead too many of these to seek relief from spirits, and other pernicious cordials, at the expence of health, and the sure consequences of penury and want.
“As this change, in the article of diet, has been very generally made, especially by the females, and the younger branches of the families of the manufacturing poor, their constitutions have been rendered much less able to bear evacuations of any sort, and particularly that of lactation. I may, with great truth, aver, that more than two hundred patients of this denomination have, within the last two years, come under my notice: upon their application for relief, and the consequent enquiry which I have been led to make respecting the nature of their diet, their almost invariable reply has been, that they have chiefly depended upon Tea for their support, at the same time that they were permitting an apparently healthy child to draw the whole of its nourishment from them.
“That it is debility, and an impoverished state of the whole system, arising from a deficiency in the due supply of proper and sufficiently nutritious aliment, at a time when the constitution particularly requires it, in consequence of the continual waste which the mother sustains from the suckling of her infant, which lay the foundation of this disease, and that the lungs are but secondarily or symptomatically affected, is clearly evinced from an attention to the symptoms.
“The patient first complains of languor, and general weakness; loss of appetite; fatigue after exercise, though it be of the gentlest kind; wearisome pains in the back and limbs; soon after which, symptoms of general atrophy come on; the face, in particular, grows thin, and is marked by a certain delicacy of complexion; paleness about the nose; but with a small degree of settled redness in the cheeks. In a short time, if the patient still continues to give suck, she is seized with transitory stitches in the sides, under the sternum, or in some other part of the thorax; accompanied with a short dry cough, and slight dyspnæa, upon any muscular exertion; the pulse also becomes frequent, but seldom so hard as in the inflammatory state of the genuine phthisis pulmonalis; morning sweats next make their appearance; abscesses and ulcers are often formed in the lungs; pus mixed with mucus is expectorated; the general weakness increases; the emaciated patient is unable to support an erect posture; and at last dies literally exhausted.”
An ingenious author observes, that as much superfluous money is expended on Tea and Sugar in this kingdom, as would maintain four millions more of subjects in bread[102]. And the author of the Farmer’s Letters calculates, that the entertainment of sipping Tea costs the poor each time as follows:
| d. | |
| The tea | ¾ |
| The sugar | ½ |
| The butter | 1 |
| The fuel and wear of the Tea equipage | ¼ |
| —— | |
| 2½ |
When Tea is used twice a day, the annual expence amounts to 7l. 12s. a head. And the same judicious writer estimates the bread, necessary for a labourer’s family of five persons, at 14l. 15s. 9d. per annum[103]. By which it appears, that the yearly expence of Tea, Sugar, &c. for two persons, exceeds that of the necessary article of bread, sufficient for a family of five persons.
It appears also, from a moderate calculation, that twenty-one millions of pounds of Tea[104] are annually imported into England. In the beginning of the present century the annual public sales by the East-India Company did not much exceed 50,000 pounds weight, independently of what little might be clandestinely imported. The Company’s annual sales about this time, 1797, approach to twenty millions of pounds; being an increase of four hundred fold in less than 100 years, and answers to the rate of more than a pound weight each in the course of the year, for the individuals of all ranks, sexes, and ages, throughout the British dominions in Europe and America[105].