'After working from 14 to 16 hours a day, we only earn from 4_s._ to 7_s._ a week, to maintain our wives and families upon; and we farther state, that although we have substituted bread and water, or potatoes and salt, for that more wholesome food an Englishman's table used to abound with, we have repeatedly retired, after a heavy day's labour, and have been under the necessity of putting our children supperless to bed, to stifle the cries of hunger. We can most solemnly declare, that for the last eighteen months we have scarcely known what it was to be free from the pangs of hunger.'[148] Then Owen in England, and Sismondi in France, almost simultaneously raised their voices in a weighty indictment of capitalist society. Owen, as a hard-headed Englishman and citizen of the leading industrial state, constituted himself spokesman for a generous social reform, whereas the petty-bourgeois Swiss rather lost himself in sweeping denunciations of the imperfections of the existing social order and of classical economics. And yet, by so doing, Sismondi gave bourgeois economics a much harder nut to crack than Owen, whose fertile practical activities were directly applied to the proletariat. Sismondi explained in some detail that the impetus for his social criticism came from England, and especially her first crisis. In the second edition of his _Nouveaux Principes d'Économie Politique Ou De La Richesse Dans Ses Rapports Avec La Population_,[149] eight years after the publication of the first edition in 1819, he writes as follows: