facts like
grains of wheat, so we will even pick a few. Meanwhile, the whole pamphlet
must be important to all, as to ourselves parts are interesting: it
represents the literature of the tea trade, and, best of all, the
profitable literature of _L.s.d._ It is written in a patriotic spirit;
witness this extract from the preface: "To a commercial union of wealth,
and a co-operation of talent and patriotism, a small island in the Western
Atlantic is indebted for the acquisition of one of the most splendid
empires that ever was subjected to the dominion of man, and also for the
rise and progress of an extraordinary commerce with a people inhabiting a
distant hemisphere, and heretofore shut out from all intercourse with the
majority of the human race;--a commerce equal in extent to 10,000,000_l_.
annually, and involving property to the amount of ten times that sum."

Our _facts_ must stand isolated, since to weave them into an argument
would be altogether foreign to our purpose.

_East India Company_.--Although the East India Company can alone import
tea, they cannot choose their own time of sale; they are compelled to put
up the tea at an advance of _one penny_ (_they do at one farthing_) per
lb.; they are obliged to have twelve months' stock in hand; and while the
tea in America has _increased in price_ and diminished in consumption, the
_very reverse_ has taken place in England, as _official returns_ prove!

_China_ presents the very remarkable spectacle of _a civilization entirely
political_, whose principal aim has constantly been to draw closer the
bonds which unite the society it formed, and to merge, by its laws, the
interest of the individual in that of the public; an empire possessing an
active, skilful, and contented population of 155,000,000 souls, who are
spread over 1,372,450 square miles of the fairest and, probably, earliest
inhabited region of the globe--that maintains a _standing army_ of
1,182,000 men, and levies a revenue of only 11,649,912_l_. sterling--an
empire that has preserved the records of its dominion and the integrity of
its name from a period of three thousand years antecedent to our era,
while the most powerful monarchies of remote or modern ages have dwindled
into nothingness, or been borne towards the ocean of eternity, by the
swiftly destructive gulf of time,--an empire whose people have materially
contributed to advance the civilization of Europe and America, by the
discovery of the most