CHANGING THE TIPPLE BUT NOT THE TIPPLING.
By New York World
Two PIECES of news published yesterday bear queer and interesting and important relations each to the other. One of them set forth the Church Army's plan of apostleship for tea—telling how tea bars are to be established, with sumptuous fittings, for the sale of the Chinese beverage, hot or cold, "with or without" sugar, lemon, cream and other accustomed accessories; how experts are to teach men and women to drink the decoction, and missionaries are to go about enticing them even in their own homes - all this not as a means of promoting the tea trade, but as a "temperance" crusade to provide a substitute for beer drinking. The other news article told of a maniac then lying in Bellevue Hospital who was driven mad and has since died as a consequence of overindulgence in tea. Cases of insanity from tea tippling are rare in this city, as rare as cases of insanity from opium-smoking. But if you go where tea drinking is the popular vice, the proportions of tea drunkards and tea lunatics to the tea-drinking population are about the same as are the proportions of alcoholic drunkards and sufferers from delirium tremens to our drinking population. And the physicians in every hospital out-patient department are familiar with cases of what they call tea intoxication. Is there not grave danger that in persuading men to change their tipple these Church Army people may be luring them to a still deadlier tippling?—New York World.