. It is certainly a phenomenon without a parallel
in the history of social man--that a great nation, numbering twenty-five
millions, after making an allowance on account of those amongst the very
poorest of the Irish who do not use tea, should within one hundred years
have found themselves able so absolutely to revolutionise their diet, as
to substitute for the gross stimulation of ale and wine the most
refined, elegant, and intellectual mode of stimulation that human
research has succeeded in discovering.[6] But the material basis of this
stimulation unhappily we draw from the soil of one sole nation--and that
nation (are we ever allowed to forget?) capricious and silly beyond all
that human experience could else have suggested as possible. In these
circumstances, it was not to be supposed that we should neglect any
opening that offered for making ourselves independent of a nation which
at all times we had so much reason to distrust as the Chinese. Might not
the tea-plant be made to prosper in some district of our Indian Empire?
Forty years ago we began to put forth organised botanical efforts for
settling that question. Forty years ago, and even earlier, according to
my remembrance, Dr Roxburgh--in those days the paramount authority upon
oriental botany--threw some energy into this experiment for creating our
own nurseries of the tea-plant. But not until our Burmese victories,
some thirty years since, and our consequent treaties had put the
province of Assam into our power, was, I believe, any serious progress
made in this important effort. Mr Fortune has since applied the benefits
of his scientific knowledge, and the results of his own great personal
exertions in the tea districts of China, to the service of this most
important speculation; with what success, I am not able to report.
Meantime, it is natural to fear that the very possibility of doubts
hanging over the results in an experiment so vitally national, carries
with it desponding auguries as to the ultimate issue. Were the prospects
in any degree cheerful, it would be felt as a patriotic duty to report
at short intervals all solid symptoms of progress made in this
enterprise; for it is an enterprise aiming at a triumph far more than
scientific--a triumph over a secret purpose of the Chinese, full of
anti-social malice and insolence against Great Britain. Of late years,
as often as we have accomplished a victory over any insult to our
national honour offered or