ide, a
lurking in the bed, and, in short, all the characteristics of idleness
for which, in his case, real want of strength furnishes an apology. The
tea drinking fills the public-house, makes the frequenting of it
habitual, corrupts boys as soon as they are able to move from home, and
does little less for the girls, to whom the gossip of the teatable is no
bad preparatory school for the brothel. At the very least, it teaches
them idleness. The everlasting dawdling about with the slops of the tea-
tackle gives them a relish for nothing 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 teakettle, 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.

"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 with pauperism on that account, without being able to
trace it to the teakettle? 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 teakettle 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 teakettle he has to return at night
with legs hardly sufficient to maintain him; and then he makes his
miserable progress towards that death which he finds ten or fifteen years
sooner