Description
An excerpt:
Exhilarating properties of tea. Its introduction into Europe. Amount consumed. Increase of this consumption.
That every variety of tea sold in our American market, if good for anything, is, in a greater or less degree, exciting or exhilarating, is, I believe, generally known. Few would long continue to use an article - even with the addition of cream, milk or sugar - which had no other effect on the system than that of pure water, viz., to quench thirst.
Of the nature and extent of the excitement produced by tea, however, most persons appear to be ignorant. They are, in all probability, little aware that it pervades, by its influence, the whole vital domain; and so far as it excites or exhilarates at all does it by affecting the brain and nervous system, the stomach, heart, liver, etc., in nearly the same way with distilled and fermentated liquors, opium and tobacco. They rarely suspect that they are admitting to their embrace, in the guise of a friend, a most insidious and dangerous enemy - one who is silently, though slowly, undermining and destroying the very citadel of life itself. That such is the fact, however, I shall be compelled by a stern regard for truth, to prove.
Exhilarating properties of tea. Its introduction into Europe. Amount consumed. Increase of this consumption.
That every variety of tea sold in our American market, if good for anything, is, in a greater or less degree, exciting or exhilarating, is, I believe, generally known. Few would long continue to use an article - even with the addition of cream, milk or sugar - which had no other effect on the system than that of pure water, viz., to quench thirst.
Of the nature and extent of the excitement produced by tea, however, most persons appear to be ignorant. They are, in all probability, little aware that it pervades, by its influence, the whole vital domain; and so far as it excites or exhilarates at all does it by affecting the brain and nervous system, the stomach, heart, liver, etc., in nearly the same way with distilled and fermentated liquors, opium and tobacco. They rarely suspect that they are admitting to their embrace, in the guise of a friend, a most insidious and dangerous enemy - one who is silently, though slowly, undermining and destroying the very citadel of life itself. That such is the fact, however, I shall be compelled by a stern regard for truth, to prove.