For very many years after its introduction into England, tea was the subject of a double monopoly. The Chinese were the only manufacturers, the East India Company the only importers. The opening of the trade deprived the consumer of the benefit of the strict supervision exercised by the Company's agents, and left the Chinese merchants master of the situation. A deterioration in the quality of the teas sent into the English market quickly followed; and every reduction in the duty tended to the same end, by encouraging the importation of low-priced leaf of little use save to mix with that of better class; and so it is almost impossible to obtain at any price what those who can remember it call 'old-fashioned tea.' At a late meeting of the Indian section of the Society of Arts, Mr Burrell, after remarking that India produced tea superior to any in the world in flavour, strength, and purity, complained that it was rarely used in this country except to mix with the inferior growth of China; and urged his hearers in their own interests and as a duty they owed to their countrymen in India, who had long toiled and struggled to meet their wants, to a more direct and extended use of Indian tea, and thereby afford a fair harvest of profit to its cultivators, for which nothing was now wanting but an increased consumption of their produce in this country. Mr Burrell, we think, should rather have appealed to the sellers of tea; for unless they bestir themselves in the matter, but few of the millions of British tea-drinkers can have the chance of tasting pure Indian tea. We are aware that 'the trade' declare pure Indian teas unsuited to the national palate; but we have no faith in their judgment. If dealers in adulterable articles are to be believed, the British public's taste is a monstrously depraved one, preferring chicory to coffee, publican's to brewer's beer, turmeric and flour to mustard, and clever concoctions of all kinds to the things they pretend to be. It may be taken for granted that the Yankee vender of wooden nutmegs was ready to swear his customers preferred the ingenious imitation to the genuine article.