“The whole spectacle of poverty indeed is incredible. As soon as you cease to have it before your eyes—even when you have it before your eyes—you can hardly believe it, and that is perhaps why so many people deny that it exists, or is much more than a superstition of the sentimentalist.”

“The system which produces the happiest moral effects will be found most beneficial to the interest of the individual and the common weal; upon this basis the science of political economy will rest at last, when the ponderous volumes with which it has been overlaid shall have sunk by their own weight into the dead sea of oblivion.”

So many persons have kindly helped me with material for this volume that it is impossible to name all of them; but I cannot forbear to express my thanks to Mr W. Pember Reeves, to Mr Tom Garnett of Clitheroe, to my old friends Mrs Bogue Luffmann and Mr H. H. Champion, who have collected information for me in Australia, and last, but not least, to Mr Gardiner for his valuable introduction.

March 1907