our race, with their causes and remedies, the subject of my studies." He pursued these studies with the greatest industry for several years, and found the extent of men's sufferings to be greatly beyond his expectation. Poverty prevailed everywhere--among labourers and among employers, too--with peoples of the highest industrial development, and with peoples of the lowest--in luxurious cities, and in the huts of villagers--in the rich plains of Lombardy, no less than the sterile wilds of Scandinavia. He arrived at the conclusion that the causes of all this lay not in nature, but in the fact that human institutions rested on false economic foundations, and he held the only possible remedy to consist in improving these institutions. He became convinced that technical perfection of production, however great, would never be able to extinguish poverty or lead to the diffusion of general comfort, and that civilization was now come to a stage in its development at which further progress depended entirely on the advancement of political economy. Political economy was, therefore, for our time the most important of all sciences, and Winkelblech now determined to give himself thoroughly to its study. Hitherto he had not done so. "During the progress of my investigations," he says, "the doctrines of economists, as well as the theories of socialists, remained almost unknown to me except in name, for I intentionally abstained from seeking any knowledge of either, in order that I might keep myself as free as possible from extraneous influences. It was only after I arrived at the results described that I set myself to a study of economic literature, and came to perceive that the substance of my thoughts, though many of them were not new, and stood in need of correction, departed completely from the accepted principles of the science." He reached the conclusion that there prevailed everywhere the symptoms of a universal social disease, and that political economy was the only physician that could cure it; but that the prevailing system of economy was quite incompetent for that task, and that a new system was urgently and indispensably required. To set forth such a system is the aim of his book. He derides Proudhon's idea of social reforms coming of themselves without design, and argues strongly that no reform worthy the name can ever be expected except as the fruit of economic researches. He agrees with the Socialists in so far as they seek to devise a new economic system, but he thinks they make a defective diagnosis of the disease, and propose an utterly inadequate remedy. He counts them entirely mistaken in attributing all existing evils to the unequal distribution of wealth, a deficiency of production being, in his opinion, a much more important source of misery than any error of distribution. In fact, his fundamental objection to the existing distribution is that it is not the distribution which conduces to the highest production, or to the most