July i, 1890.] 
THE TROPICAL AGRICULTURIST, 
21 
good deal of feeling and interest were exhibited during 
the hearing. 
Editobial on the above in the 
London “Times.” 
The remarka in the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s 
Budget speech on the retail price of tea are curi- 
ously illustrated in our Police news this morning. 
Two tea-dealers, Mr. Thomas Paget and Mr. Eobert 
Pigott, were brought before the magistrate at 
Worship-street on a change of having sold tea to 
which a false trade description bad been applied. 
The tea in question bore the brand of “ The 
Sogama Estate,” and it was not contented on the 
part of the defence that it was rightly thus labelled. 
What label it ought to have borne was left un- 
decided to the last. It had been described by the 
vendors as “ choice Ceylon tea, a blend of Ceylon 
and other choica growths.” The first expert who was 
called stated in evidence that he had had a packet of 
the tea submitted to him, and that he had tested it, 
and had come to the conclusion that the contents 
were made up of Indian and China tea, He has 
not prepared to swear that there was no Ceylon 
tea in it, but he did not think there was any. 
The next witness spoke substantially to the same 
effect. He was confident that most of the ‘‘choice 
Ceylon tea ” was nothing but inferior tea of Indian 
and China growths. Mr. Thomas Paget, on the 
other hand, maintained firmly that the tea which 
he had sold was Ceylon and Indian tea, and that no 
particle of China tea had been mixed up in the 
blend. But on the main charge he had no defence 
ready. He had sold tea with the brand of the 
Sogama Estate, and this he acknowledged it had no 
scintilla of a right to bear, since, whatever it was, 
none of it was Sogama tea. This admission was 
all that he could be induced to make. When he 
was questioned about the cost of the ‘‘choice growths” 
which he had used in blending his tea, his reply 
was that he was not prepared to expose trade 
secrets. On the amount of Ceylon tea in his 
blend he was equally reticent. It was a trade 
sscret which he was not willing to divulge. But 
whatever the quality of his tea, and however much 
or little of Ceylon tea there was in it, it had 
certainly been misdescribed, and its purchasers had 
been thus misled. Some severe remarks from Mr. 
Bushby and a fine of £ 10 , with costs allowed to the 
prosecutors, concluded the case. 
Tea is a subject of very general public interest. 
We fear, therefore, that there will be widespread 
dismay and surprise at the amount of mystery 
with which the tea trade is shown to be sur- 
rounded. The object of those engaged in it seems 
to be to keep everybody in the dark. There are trade 
secrets at every stage. In dealing with the report 
this morning, we must begin with the wholesale 
tea blender, since the case in Court does not carry 
us any further back than this. He is unquestion- 
ably a man of mysteries. How his mixtures are 
made, and at what original cost he obtains the 
materials for making them, is his own private 
affair, and no one but himself is to know any- 
thing about it. His customers, the retail tea 
grocers, are men of like mind. They do not wish 
the public to know where they get their teas, and 
accordingly they prefer packets which have no 
blender’s name upon them. The blender, we 
need hardly say, is ready to accommodate them 
in so simple a matter. That they object to 
packets with high-sounding titles upon them we 
are not told, and wo should not believe it if we 
were. The evidence given yesterday at Worship- 
street is too clear to the contrary. But, how- 
ever unwilling the defendants were to allow us 
a glimpse into their trade secrets, there was more 
than one revelation made in the course of the 
case for the prosecution. It was stated, and it 
was not contradicted, that an offer had been 
made on the part of one of the defendants to pay 
a royalty to the Sogama Estate Company for the 
right to use their labels. Now, such a right as 
this would not need to be bought and paid for if 
the contents of the packets corresponded with the 
labels outside. Sogama tea could be described as 
Sogama tea with no risk of a penalty under the 
Merchandise Marks Act. The offence charged 
yesterday was, not that labels had been used on 
which no royalty had been paid, but that there 
was nothing in the packets answering to the labels. 
We come next to the quality and cost of the tea 
thus misdescribed. Choice Ceylon tea mixed 
with other choice growths is the blender’s ac- 
count of it. Inferior Indian and China tea is 
the corrected statement on the part of the prose- 
cution, with perhaps some Ceylon tea added, but 
more probably without any. We must leave our 
readers to choose between the two stories. They 
cannot both of them be true. As regards the cost 
of the tea, much will depend on the version which 
we adopt as to its quality and place of origin. 
We learn that some Ceylon tea can be bought at 
llid per lb. and Indian and China tea for about 
3 d less. If, therefore, the incriminated packets 
were rightly said to have contained little or noth- 
ing but inferior Indian and China tea, we may 
put the blender’s outlay at about SJd a pound. 
The price charged to the retail purchaser of the 
so-called Sogama tea was 2s per lb„ so that 
there is a good margin for profit on the trans- 
action. Mr. Thomas Paget’s account was that 
the tea he used cost from lOd to Is Id per lb. * 
without duty. On the proportions used of each 
sort, and on the joint cost of his materials, he 
refused to say anything. Shall we be wrong in 
assuming that he put in the lOd tea with a freer 
hand than that at Is Id and that possibly the 
average cost of the whole was not greatly in 
excess of the lower of the two sums ? This reduces 
the profit as shown by an adverse witness, but it 
leaves it tolerably high still. In the absence of 
complete evidence, wa can come to no definite 
conclusions either way. The presiding magistrate, 
Mr. Bushby, has drawn his own inferences, but 
he has not told us what they are. The public, he 
adds, will draw theirs, so that we may be well 
content to leave the case as we find it, and to re* 
main in ignorance about matters on which neither Mr. 
Bushby nor the public are in any need of our help. 
There is one point of interest on which Mr. 
Bushby sought to be informed, but on which the 
witness for the prosecution could throw no 
light. Is it usual in the tea trade to pay 
a royalty for the right to sell goods under the 
name of some one else, and with no regard to the 
truth or falsehood of the description ? Possibly, the 
more usual course is for the fraudulent label to be 
used, with no money paid for it and with no leave 
asked. That this is sometimes done we are entitled 
to say — the case on which we have been comment- 
ing is proof of it. But a deception of this kind is 
only possible under certain conditions. There must 
be at least two parties to it — an unsorupnlcuB 
vendor and an unskilled purchaser. This latter 
condition is very commonly met. The public, as 
a rule, knows very little about tea, and it can be 
put off accordingly with very indifferent stuff. 
The tipplers, as Mr. Goschen terms them, have a 
more formed taste. For tea drinkers almost any- 
thing will do, and as long as this state of things 
continues there will be shops found from which 
they will be served with almost anything— except, 
indeed, with good tea, sold fr ankly for what it is. 
* This was a misreport : these are th^ prices of 
pure Ceylon tea.— Ed. T. A. 
