In order to be enabled to state, as much as possible upon my own knowledge, the extent to which the internal markets of the country are depressed, and the consumption of produce is declining, I have instituted inquiries among some of the leading houses in Liverpool, who send travellers into the country, and the reports given are fully as discouraging as those given by Messrs Littledale, as to the difficulty both of making sales and collecting accounts. From a gentleman connected with a leading firm in the tea trade, I learn that in the country over which their travellers prosecute their business, the orders which they receive are for very limited quantities, and are, in fact, demonstrative of what, in mercantile parlance, is styled “a hand to mouth” business. Excessive caution and want of spirit characterise the feelings of the retail trade everywhere. Some of these parties, he suggests, may have locked up a portion of their capital in railway investments, or perhaps lost it. Still, hand to mouth orders—orders for a week’s instead of a month’s consumption, would tell in the long run, if they served to make up the aggregate of past years. But they do not. The consumption of this necessary article is found to be declining; and the objection of the retail dealer to order as largely as usual is accounted for, in the majority of cases, by the inability of the farming and middle classes to pay their accounts as punctually as heretofore. It must be borne in mind, in treating of the consumption of such an article as tea—and I may include coffee, sugar, &c.—that they frequently form the substitute for the poor man’s meal. When the consumption of tea declines, in times acknowledged to be bad, it is the worst sign of the condition of the community.