ght have been large relatively to the power of calling out lower qualities
of soil, and yet in itself have been small; but _our_ demand, running up at
present to 100,000,000 pounds weight annually, is in all senses enormous.
The poorer class of Chinese tea-drinkers use the leaves three times
over--_i. e._, as the basis of three separate tea-makings. Consequently,
even upon that single deduction, 60,000,000 of Chinese tea-drinkers count
only as 20,000,000 of ours. But I conclude, by repeating that the greatest
of the impressions made by ourselves in the China tea districts, has been
derived from this--that, whilst the native demand has probably been
stationary, ours, moving by continual starts forward, must have stimulated
the tea interest by continual descents upon inferior soils.

There is no doubt that the Emperor and all his arrogant courtiers have
decupled their incomes from the British stimulation applied to inferior
soils, that but for us never would have been called into culture. Not a
man amongst them is aware of the advantages which he owes to England.
But he soon _would_ be aware of them, if for five years this exotic
demand were withdrawn, and the tea-districts resigned to native
patronage. Upon reviewing what I have said, not the ignorant and
unteachable Chinese only, but some even amongst our own well-informed
and reflecting people, will see that they have prodigiously underrated
the commercial value of England to China; since, when an Englishman
calls for a hundred tons of tea, he does not (as is usually supposed)
benefit the Chinese merchant only by giving him the ordinary profit on a
ton, repeated for a hundred times, but also infallibly either calls into
profitable activity lands lying altogether fallow, or else, under the
action of the rent laws, gives a new and secondary value to land already
under culture.

Other and greater topics connected with this coming Chinese campaign
clamorously call for notice: especially these three:--

First, the pretended literature and meagre civilisation of China--what
they are, and with what real effects such masquerading phantoms operate
upon the generation with which accidents of commerce have brought us
connected.

Secondly, what is the true mode of facing that warfare of kidnapping,
garotting, and poisoning, avowed as legitimate subjects of patronage in
the practice and in the edicts of the Tartar Government? Two things may
be said with painful certainty upon th