(43 Geo. III., cap. 112) making it illegal for
grocers to have chicory on their premises.
Many prosecutions were instituted by the
Excise, and an appeal was consequently made
to the Treasury to allow them to sell it.
The Treasury Minute of 1832 sanctioned the
sale of unmixed chicory. Here, then, was an
opening for unscrupulous dealers to begin a
profitable business, by charging for the
"mixture as before," as if it were pure coffee. In
a few years the town was flooded with " real
old Mocha " from Belgium. This was a little
too bad. "Persian sherbet" is extant for
sale, to be sure, in certain queer little shops,
with a pink portrait of a young lady, and
shoulders of mutton made of clammy sugar;
but it is only a " penny a glass," even " fresh
from the fountain!" The oriental Hugg would
scorn to charge for it, as if it was the real
favourite sherbet of the Pasha of Kabobanople!

Next came a further development. Grocers
wanted power, now, to sell chicory and coffee
mixed. They got that inestimable privilege.
Nobody could be sure, when he paid for Mocha
that he was not paying for a mixture of
two-thirds chicory. At once the British farmer
bestirred himself; foreign chicory (taxed
six-pence) was driven out of the market, and now
the home crop is a most important agricultural
production. Ceylon soon found itself, like
Frankenstein, bearded by its own monster—
Protection. It was opposed by a rival at
home worse than the foreigner against whom
it was " protected! " The feelings of the
Ceylon coffee-growers, when they found their
own Protection had driven us here, in England,
to drink decoctions of home-grown chicory,
must have been very like the disgust of
Polyphemus's butcher when the monster
took to dining off pine-tops. Mr. Armitage,
in forwarding the last of their memorials,
says, that " even the most benighted of
the colonists are, at length, awakening to a
conviction that any further clamour for
protection is worse than useless; " and that
"many of the coffee-planters are nearly
ruined." The Memorial complains that
"chicory and other adulterating substances"
—being " sold as coffee "—are " subject to no
Customs duty or Excise, in Great Britain,
while coffee itself is burdened with an import
duty of nearly forty shillings per cwt., or one
hundred per cent. on its average value." The
melancholy gentlemen wish no persecution of
the chicorian sect; they are for fair toleration:
—free coffee; unadulterated coffee; or taxed
chicory.

At the words "other adulterating
substances " the reader (who has just breakfasted
on " old Mocha; " and perhaps, being of a
fanciful turn has been thinking of Mecca,
with a distant view of a mosque) turns pale.
But let his imagination carry him as far as it
will in conjecture on the subject, it will fall
far short of the realities. It is not enough
that simple chicory should adulterate coffee;
but even that must be villainously
compounded; the adulteration itself must be
adulterated. Chicory begins, but worse—
that is to say, beans, corn, potato-flour,
horse-chesnuts, acorns, dog-biscuit, rope-yarn,
Russian glue, brick-dust, mahogany saw-dust,
rotten coffin-wood, soot, and " other manures"
—remain behind. It reads like the bill of some
Falstaff of tragedy—one-halfpenny worth of
coffee to this intolerable deal of adulteration!
A competent authority tells us of cases which
came under his special observations:—first,
of a large quantity of beans—which
decomposition had animated into an unfit state for
feeding horses—being sold to a chicory-grinder;
and, secondly, of large quantities of " spent tan"
(the refuse of the tan-yards) being systematically
ground up to form part of these floating
masses of commercial pollution. There lies
on our table, as we write, a red powder—" red
ochre"—commonly used to "colour" the
floors of cottages; it is known that waggon
loads of this have been seen discharged at the
door of a well known and extensive " coffee"
manufacturer! You cannot walk the streets
without the most obvious proofs of the existence
of fraud. " Java Coffee, a shilling a
pound," stares at you through brazen and
lying cards—and sham tea-chests—while the
quoted market price, in " Prince's Price
Current," is much higher. The very duty
itself being sixpence!

Let us look at a summary of the results.
The colonists complain; the shop-keepers
become fraudulent; and the poor suffer.
Moreover, the revenue diminishes. The effete
Budget proposed to equalise the duties on
all sorts of coffee, and to equalise with
them (at three-pence) foreign chicory. But
this leaves the adulterating party in the
advantage; for, while not affecting the
use of home chicory, it tends to negative
the effects of the reduction on coffee,
generally. Mr. Anstey's demand on the Budget
debate (and this, too, was the demand of the
chief speakers at the recent great meeting on
the subject) was for the abolition of the latest
of the two above-mentioned Treasury Minutes
—that of 1840. That step would leave the
adulteration amenable to Government
supervision, and put one sort of fraud on a level
with another;—for a false mixture is surely
as fair a subject of punishment as a false
weight! Let all parties have justice; let
the seller of unadulterated chicory sell it to
those who choose to buy it—this is a free
country; but don't let us have things sold
under false pretences.

The prosperous classes may protect
themselves by grinding their own coffee; but what
protection have the poor ? It is heartless
sophistry to say that they like these mixtures
—they who have never tasted anything better.
It is still baser to say—as some tradesmen
appear to imply—that they have no right to
anything better; that purity is a " luxury"
which does not belong to their class! We