othing that requires strength and activity. When they go from home, they
know how to do nothing that is useful. To brew, to bake, to make butter,
to milk, to rear poultry; to do any earthly thing of use they are wholly
unqualified. To shut poor young creatures up in manufactories is bad
enough; but there, at any rate, they do something that is useful; whereas,
the girl that has been brought up merely to boil the tea-kettle, and to
assist in the gossip inseparable from the practice, is a mere consumer of
food, a pest to her employer, and a curse to her husband, if any man be so
unfortunate as to fix his affections upon her.

33. But is it in the power of any man, any good labourer, who has attained
the age of fifty, to look back upon the last thirty years of his life,
without cursing the day in which tea was introduced into England? Where is
there such a man, who cannot trace to this cause a very considerable part
of all the mortifications and sufferings of his life? When was he ever
_too late_ at his labour; when did he ever meet with a frown, with a
turning off, and pauperism on that account, without being able to trace it
to the tea-kettle? When reproached with lagging in the morning, the poor
wretch tells you that he will make up for it by _working during his
breakfast time_! I have heard this a hundred and a hundred times over. He
was up time enough; but the tea-kettle kept him lolling and lounging at
home; and now, instead of sitting down to a breakfast upon bread, bacon,
and beer, which is to carry him on to the hour of dinner, he has to force
his limbs along under the sweat of feebleness, and at dinner time to
swallow his dry bread, or slake his half-feverish thirst at the pump or
the brook. To the wretched tea-kettle he has to return at night, with legs
hardly sufficient to maintain him; and thus he makes his miserable
progress towards that death, which he finds ten or fifteen years sooner
than he would have found it had he made his wife brew beer instead of
making tea. If he now and then gladdens his heart with the drugs of the
public house, some quarrel, some accident, some illness, is the probable
consequence; to the affray abroad succeeds an affray at home; the
mischievous example reaches the children, corrupts them or scatters them,
and misery for life is the consequence.

34. I should now proceed to the _details_ of brewing; but these, though
they will not occupy a large space, must be put off to the _secon