a
journalistic monopoly; the argument being that the newspapers of the day
were choked with advertisements, filled with foolish stories gathered by
all-too enterprising newswriters, and that the only way for the
government to escape "further excesses occasioned by the freedom of the
press" and to rid itself of "those pests of society, the unlicensed
newsvendors," was for it to intrust the coffee men, as "the chief
supporters of liberty" with the publication of a _Coffee House Gazette_.
Information for the journal was to be supplied by the habitues of the
houses themselves, written down on brass slates or ivory tablets, and
called for twice daily by the _Gazette's_ representatives. All the
profits were to go to the coffee men--including the expected increase of
custom.

Needless to say, this amazing proposal of the coffee-house masters to
have the public write its own newspapers met with the scorn and the
derision it invited, and nothing ever came of it.

The increasing demand for coffee caused the government tardily to seek
to stimulate interest in the cultivation of the plant in British
colonial possessions. It was tried out in Jamaica in 1730. By 1732 the
experiment gave such promise that Parliament, "for encouraging the
growth of coffee in His Majesty's plantations in America," reduced the
inland duty on coffee coming from there, "but of none other," from two
shillings to one shilling six pence per pound. "It seems that the French
at Martinico, Hispaniola, and at the Isle de Bourbon, near Madagascar,
had somewhat the start of the English in the new product as had also the
Dutch at Surinam, yet none had hitherto been found to equal coffee from
Arabia, whence all the rest of the world had theirs." Thus writes Adam
Anderson in 1787, somewhat ungraciously seeking to damn England's
business rivals with faint praise. Java coffee was even then in the
lead, and the seeds of Bourbon-Santos were multiplying rapidly in
Brazilian soil.

The British East India Company, however, was much more interested in tea
than in coffee. Having lost out to the French and Dutch on the "little
brown berry of Arabia," the company engaged in so lively a propaganda
for "the cup that cheers" that, whereas the annual tea imports from 1700
to 1710 averaged 800,000 pounds, in 1721 more than 1,000,000 pounds of
tea were brought in. In 1757, some 4,000,000 pounds were imported. And
when the coffee house finally succumbed, tea, and not coffee, was fi