The City correspondent of the Morning Herald has, with his
usual felicity, been exposing the weakness of the arguments on which his friends, the advocates for the monopoly of the tea-trade, rest their cause. He says, as others have said, that there is no possibility of forcing more of our manufactures upon the Chinese; and that our merchants ate happy, if they but knew their happiness, in escaping the penalty which the tea-trade has imposed upon the Americans—the penalty of paying for tea, not with goods, but " hard dollars." We do not know that the Americans have any thing but corn or timber to offer besides dollars, and therefore their case is so far scarcely parallel with ours ; but we believe that the East India Company has never refused to supply the Americans with tea,—and that the Americans do not deal at the India Company's shop, is to be ascribed, we presume, to the circumstance that the Chinese are content with fewer of these hard dollars than our monopolists are. It is precisely from a wish to save " hard dollars" to the country, that we advocate free trade in tea.
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