Rensselaer Republican, Volume 25, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 December 1892 — A Nation of Tea-Drinkers. [ARTICLE]

A Nation of Tea-Drinkers.

Julian Ralph, in Harper's Weekly. What an English home would be without tea I cannot imagine. What England itself would be Without that beverage it is difficult to conceive. It is no exaggeration to say that one might as well try to fancy New York city without a bar-room. They drink enough liduor in England, heaven knows —enough to float our navy. But the liquor drinking is incidental, while tea drinking is apparently essential to the natioual life. Where we see advertisements of patent medicines in America, they see advertisements of tea. “O & O Tea,” “Tiptop Tea," “Wonderful Tea,” “Ceylon Tea”—these words stare at the British from every dead-wall, o® every ’bus, in every newspaper. And no foreigner can escape the actual substance dr fluid any more than the native can avoid the advertisements. You have tea for breakfast, tea for luncheon, tea at late supper. You only miss it at dinner, but meanwhile you have had it at 5 o’clock. If you call on your banker in his office, on your friend in his home, on your fellow-lodger in your hotel, he rings a bell and tea is brought in with thin slices of buttered bread, or, if ladies are present, with tarts. Why, the editor of one of the principal newspapers in England told rue that every man jack in, his establish-ment-clerks, reporters, publishers aud editors —has tea at 5 o’clock every day as sure as that hour arrives. “And it is a most excellent practice,” said he, sipping from his own cup in his delightful home, “for it brings all the people together as nothing else could do, and we find out from one another just what each one has been doing or is going to do during the day'.” Tea! tea! tea! Was ever a Nation so enslaved? TVhatever they do, wherever they go, they have their tea. There is no commodity or habit in Amertca to liken to that in EnI gland Tke.y„canuQL.ga t t.„..wit.liQ.ti,t.iV. visit without it, assemble at home without it, picnic without; it. or attend to business without it. And such tea! They say we Amercans do not know what tea is. If they know we certainly do not. for never have I tasted such bitter, strong, nerve murdering, sleep dispelling, drug like tea. I had to weaken it at least one-h.ilf, and then T-feund it aromatic and pleasant — i that is to say', as nearly pleasant as | that sick room decoction ever can be ; to a masculine, coffee drinking American.