When I was a boy I knew Nature as a child knows its nurse, and Tea I denounced for a drug. I found to support this fine instinct many arguments, all of which are still sound, though not one of them would prevent me now from drinking my twentieth cup. It was introduced late and during a corrupt period. It was an exotic. It was a sham exhilarant to which fatal reactions could not but attach. It was no part of the Diet of the Natural Man. The two nations that alone consume it—the English and the Chinese—are become, by its baneful influence on the imagination, the most easily deceived in the world. Their politics are a mass of bombastic illusions. Also it dries their skins. It tans the liver, hardens the coats of the stomach, makes the brain feverishly active, rots the nerve-springs; all that
