TEA IN TROUBLE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 263, 5 November 1937, Page 6

TEA IN TROUBLE.

According to Fielding, "Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea," but tea itself is a sufficient scandal in Germany. At any rate, the convention of "five o'clock tea" has just been sternly denounced in an organ of the Storm Troopers, which, not content with spurning the proffered cup on behalf of Nazi stalwarts, adds that the institution itself "has degenerated in England, the country of its I origin." The habit of noticing grave symptoms of change and decay in all countries ; which have not submit tod to a dictatorship seems to l>c well established in modern comments from the Herman Press (says the Guardian"), but it would be interesting to know wliv tea has taken the downward path. Is it because it has spread 'beyond the household and invaded the office, i where, according to a sons of the moment, i "Everything stops for tea" as the finsiers of the dial reach not five but four o'clock? That ; might indicate a lack of seriousness and concentration: or pe'haps the Nazi critios have 1 heard how teas" spread themselves out j into robust knife-and-fork functions which Icould not possibly ho approved in the case of I citizens who had been warned to husband their j resources and make "guns instead of butter" i their self-denying aspiration when they sit down to anv table at any time. Actually, the real grievance appears to be that tea in Germany is "a foreign custom" whose adoption , wars against "the psychic values and cultural forms" of the Fatherland. Worse still, it was "modern society" influenced by "the Jewish spirit" that introduced the five o'clock tea to (Germany—and it might have also been added that the herb itself is obviously of nonAryan origin. And if German tea is as weak as the case thus presented against it. perhaps it is hardly worth defending either as a beverage or as an institution.