The Montgomery advertiser., 1906-01-14

y nese mandarin and Chinese coolie. In dian rajah. Russian prince, English
 duke and American millionaire, Indian
 street. juggler, moujik and cockney and
 New York East-sider--with them all
 the cup of tea is a common indulgence.
 Recently this habit has called forth
 columns of protest against its menace to the public health, and columns of re-
 plies in defense of the cup that cheers but not irfebriates,' With all the dis cussion, the tea drinking has gone steadily on, though America Is far from the head of the list in this respect. Of
 the worlds total consumption, the Chinese drink two billion pounds. leav- ing 500.000.0o0 pounds for the rest of the world. Great Britain uses 250, ,000,-
 900, or as much as all the other coun- tries outside of China put together, and s6 per cent of Great Brtain's supply
 comes from her own possessions. Ceylon and India. The individual Englishman drinks as much tea as the Chinaman, for in both countries it is liked so well that enough Is consumed to amount to about six pounds year for every man, woman and child.
 Just how the Chinaman gets away with the 1.S00 cups that his six pounds should give him no one knows, for in spite of Boxer wars and missionaries the real life of the Celestial Kingdom is still hidden from the Occidental, but in England the tea drinking is done by keeping steadily at 1t from dawn 10
 bedtime. The Englishman who can afford 1t has tea served to him before he Is out of bed, and the poorest and hardest worked clerk would bitterly resent the loss of his afternoon cup. The more excitable American. who con- tents himself with one pound a year, is forced to attribute the endurance of his trans-Atlantie cousins nerves to the climate" which at pinch can be made to cover a multitude of weak nesses.
 But Englishmen and Chinamen alike are outclassed by the Australian bush whacker with his annual ration of seven and half pounds. This is-not so
 surprising, for the bushwacker carries
 his provender with him, and every out of door expert knows what an ever
 present help a cup of tea is. Experi-
 enced mountaineers on long climbs In
 the Alps prefer cold tea to any other beverage and the woods are literally
 full of 1t during the camping season
 Only in France. the land of coffee aud absinthe and always antagonistic to it's
 ancient enemy" perfdious Albion, is tea comparatively unpopular, Tor the
 French use only a twentieth or pound apiece.
 While the United states. as a whole. occupies no exalted place in the list of tea consuming countries the tenement house dwellers of the East Side are second to none in their devotion to the
 herb. Here the pot of tea spends the day boiling on the top of the kitchen stove, and tea-drinking accounts for much of the illness to be found in the district-not because tea Is necessarily injurious. but because 1t Is badly made and used to take the place Of nourishing food.
 As a nation. Americans are accused
 of bad tea-making, but as least, they
 are not SO from lack of advice. Ac-
 cording to the recommendations of no less an expert than the President of the National Tea Growers Association, tea making Is an exact science from the rules of which no deviation is possible
 without disastrous results. The water,
 always to be drawn fresh from the faucet, should be allowed to boil furi- ously, but not so long that it's gases may be exhausted. After being poured on the leaves, the boiling water must | be allowed to remain for not less than seven minutes or more than ten; atter
 which it should be poured off into an other heated vessel One teaspoonful of tea Is sufficient for one cup.
 There are scientific reasons for these stipulations. the neglect of any one of I which means the ruin of the whole | product If the tea draws" for less | than seven minutes. the thein fails to l oppear. and thein Is the whole reason d'etre of tea--its tonic. the latent good | that many tea-drinker gets nothing ] of If the tea draws more than ten minutes, out comes the evil that is in | It. the deadly tannin, responsible for so
 much neurasthenia and digestive de- | engagements.
 With the teapot simmering all day loEg the noxious tannin has abundant opportunity to make it's appearance l One of the first effects is not altogether displeasing to the average inhabitant of a city tenement, for it kills the ap- petite for solid food. Tea, then, with a slice or two of bread becames in very many cases the chief staple of diet Deliberately, sometimes, the poor take to tea, because they have learned it's comforting influence upon the appetite and argue from that it's satisfying properties Y.
 Remarkably far-reaching are the physical effects of such diet Sore eyes, the average laymen would not, in all probability think of attributing to tea. but the connection between the two is very apparent to workers in city dispensaries. Many of the patients who find their way into the eye clinics of the New York Post-Graduate Medlcal school which Is situated in the heart
 of a large tenement district, would
 have had no trouble at all had their bodies been properly nourished. AS
 it is a tiny cinder or a speck of dust 1 breaks through the enfeeblea tissues and the complications that follow call l for the skill of the best surgeons Tn the city. Of nervous ailments, easily l trace1ble to a diet of stimulant instead of nourisnment. there are even
 greater number of cases.
 The poor do not come to the hospital
 however, until they have something | more definite to complain of than the general effects of malnutrition, lano
 when they do arrive the immediate
 occasion of their presence may be any
 one of the hundred things so pressing
 in its demand for prompt attention as
 to overshadow the original cause one
 of the men whose work gives him the
 most direct view of the havoc Wroughl by the misuse of tea is the distrlcl | physician of the Post Graduate Medi' 1 cal School whose daily rounds take
 him into one tenement after another ' One woman he found the other day IT a condition of ultra nervousness, ar habituaI tea-drinker, living upon fl
 almost to the exclusion of everything
 else. She was thin and sallow ant likely to collapse at any unusual occur
 renee. When the doctor demonstrated
 and ordered a change of diet, the wo- man said, "Ah. but with tea, you know doctor. the bills go down for every thing else. We poor folks can't be getting all the delicacies in the market i and, when I have tea l don't want any
 thing else" ..,,. l rT1n q