90 



is a large quantity of chicory sold by itself, and drank as a 

 beverage in the neighbourhood of Manchester and Liverpool. 

 I believe the price of a pound of the cheapest kind of coffee, 

 purchased by the bulk of the poor people, and a pound of the 

 mixture, is about the same. The trade say, when we use a 

 portion of chicory we use a better coffee. I do not know the 

 fact of my own knowledge. "Whether the coffee sold in 

 mixtures is of a superior quality to that sold as a pure article 

 would be very difficult to ascertain ; it depends upon the 

 question of taste and aroina. The chicory itself is not always 

 pure." 



On the first introduction of chicory into Great Britain a 

 nominal duty of 20 per cent, was levied on it, which, owing 

 to the representations of the coffee-planters, was afterwards 

 increased to the same rate as that then payable on British 

 plantation coffee. The high duty thus levied on foreign- 

 grown chicory soon led to its cultivation in England, but so 

 little was known of the plant that the farmers required the 

 rent to be paid in advance for the use of their land. In the 

 autumn of 1853 we find chicory grown in Kent, Surrey, and 

 Essex, where the article was prepared, and met with a large 

 sale. With the increasing demand for the root, its cul- 

 ture spread to Bedford, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, 

 Leicestershire, Cheshire, and Yorkshire. At first the price 

 realised was as high as 501. per ton ground, and 20Z. per ton 

 in the root. But as the growth extended the price receded. 

 The admission, duty free, of foreign-grown chicory, in 1854, 

 led to the abandonment of much of the home culture. 



In 1842, Mr. McCulloch assumed the growth and con- 

 sumption of chicory in the United Kingdom to be 6 J million 

 pounds ; in 1850, from careful inquiries I instituted, I esti- 

 mated the consumption then to be double that amount. Mr. 

 Braithwaite Poole, in his " Statistics of Commerce," pub- 

 lished in 1852, rated the actual production of chicory-root, 



