We wonder the ladies never agitated for the reduction of the duty off tea. They should have formed an "Anti-Tea League." If they had only laid their tongues together, the death-rattle of the duty would have sounded for ever. The noise would have made ministers tremble, and the great wall of China would have shaken like a row of plates on a kitchen dresser with the tremendous reverberation. Imagine 12,000,000 tongues calling out "Repeal the duty off tea!" and then conceive, if you can, what the intensity of that clamour would be when every one of those 12,000,000 tongues was a female tongue! We pronounce this omission a terrible _lapsus linguæ_ on the part of the Wives and Daughters and Grandmothers of England. Where, we ask, is Mrs. Ellis? that formidable female champion of Great Britain. Let us suppose that this Utopia has arrived. Tea is free! Bohea has burst its fiscal fetters, and the "best black" is emancipated from its custom-house bonds. Now, it has been proved by every political economist that the cheapening of an article always increases its consumption. What oceans of tea then will be drank when the luxury can be procured at six farthings a cup cheaper! "A dish of tea" will be magnified into a soup-tureen; urns will swell into the size of beer-barrels; and a tea-caddy will assume the dimensions of nothing smaller than a corn-bin. The carts of "No. One, St. Paul's," will vie in grandeur with Barclay and Perkins' drays; and John will be told to go down into the cellar "to bring up another hogshead of the Best Sixpenny Mixed." Scandal, which, next to the sloe, forms the principal ingredient in every brewing of tea, will increase also in proportion to the consumption. No one's reputation will be safe. It will be quite frightful to calculate the dear innocents who will die the death of kittens in the "social cup," and the innumerable characters that will be put into scalding water, and scraped as clean as bitter-almonds, at every "_Thé Réunion!_" Washer-women too—the greatest _trait_ in whose amphibious characters is proverbially the tea-tray—will be in a state of celestial _scan. mag._ all day, and will fine-draw their customers' respectability at the same time that they mangle their linen. Female society, in short, will grow into a species of Inhumane Society; and inquests will be held amongst gentlemen after dinner on the lost reputation of their friends, and the verdict will be "Felo-de-se at Mrs. Candour's Tea-party," or "Found Drowned in a Teetotaller's slop-basin." Husbands of England! beware of Cheap Tea, or else the sugar-tongs may be turned against you in the same way that St. Dunstan treated a certain French gentleman by the nose. [Illustration] [Illustration: A GOOD CUP OF TEA. (_WHEN THE DUTY IS TAKEN OFF_) ] [Illustration] [Illustration]