PREFACE. 
viii 
a long and practical acquaintance with the 
subject has more and more convinced me that 
their elevation, like everything else that is 
good and lasting, must be by slow degrees, and 
by the permeating influences of education and 
religion. Intelligence and morality shape the 
political economy of a people more than the 
material and physical conditions which surround 
them, and its form is every varying. Our 
present political economy is very different from 
that of the Ashantees or Patagonians—very 
different even from our own of fifty years ago. 
This treatise does not seek to dive deeply into 
the past nor soar far into the future, but to 
define as exactly as possible the political 
economy of the present, to measure as nearly 
as need be the elevation to which our working 
classes have already attained as compared with 
their immediate past, and to point out to them 
selves and all interested in their welfare their 
next steps still further upwards. 
Amongst them, I am happy to know, are 
thousands unsurpassed for intelligence and 
morals by any in the land, and capable of 
takino- their place in industrial associations far 
ahead of their times, but they are ‘bound 
in the bundle of life ’ with immensely greater 
numbers who are now, and will be for many