ets was vastly improved.
Doubtless the long journey in sailing vessels over tropic seas made for
better quality. It was estimated that Arabia in this way exported about
a million bushels a year of "Turkish" and "Indian" coffee.

The coffee houses became the gathering places for wits, fashionable
people, and brilliant and scholarly men, to whom they afforded
opportunity for endless gossip and discussion. It was only natural that
the lively interchange of ideas at these public clubs should generate
liberal and radical opinions, and that the constituted authorities
should look askance at them. Indeed the consumption of coffee has been
curiously associated with movements of political protest in its whole
history, at least up to the nineteenth century.

Coffee has promoted clear thinking and right living wherever introduced.
It has gone hand in hand with the world's onward march toward democracy.

As already told in this work, royal orders closed the coffee houses for
short periods in Constantinople and in London; Germany required a
license for the sale of the beverage; the French Revolution was fomented
in coffee-house meetings; and the real cradle of American liberty is
said to have been a coffee house in New York. It is interesting also to
note that, while the consumption of coffee has been attended by these
agitations for greater liberty for three centuries, its production for
three centuries, in the Dutch East Indies, in the West Indies, and in
Brazil, was very largely in the hands of slaves or of forced labor.

Since the spread of the use of coffee to western Europe in the
seventeenth century, the development of the trade has been marked,
broadly speaking, by two features: (1) the shifting of the weight of
production, first to the West Indies, then to the East Indies, and then
to Brazil; and (2) the rise of the United States as the chief coffee
consumer of the world. Until the close of the seventeenth century, the
little district in Arabia, whence the coffee beans had first made their
way to Europe, continued to supply the whole world's trade. But sprigs
of coffee trees were beginning to go out from Arabia to other promising
lands, both eastward and westward. As previously related, the year 1699
was an important one in the history of this expansion, as it was then
that the Dutch successfully introduced the coffee plant from Arabia into
Java. This started a Far Eastern industry, whose importance continues to
this day