in London, in
1832_).--_Th. Hodgskin._

You are not a political economist, Jonathan, nor a statistician. Most
books on political economy, and most books filled with statistics,
seem to you quite unintelligible. Your education never included the
study of such books and they are, therefore, almost if not quite
worthless to you.

But every working man ought to know something about political economy
and be familiar with some statistics relating to social conditions.
So I am going to ask you to study a few figures and a little political
economy. Only just a very little, mind you, just to get you used to
thinking about social problems in a scientific way. I think I can set
the fundamental principles of political economy before you in very
simple language, and I will try to make the statistics interesting.

But I want to warn you again, Jonathan, that you must use your own
commonsense. Don't trust too much to theories and figures--especially
figures. Somebody has said that you can divide the liars of the world
into three classes--liars, damned liars and statisticians. Some people
are paid big salaries for juggling with figures to fool the American
people into believing what is not true, Jonathan. I want you to
consider the laws of political economy and all the statistics I put
before you in the light of your own commonsense and your own practical
experience.

Political economy is the name which somebody long ago gave to the
formal study of the production and distribution of wealth. Carlyle
called it "the dismal science," and most books on the subject are
dismal enough to justify the term. Upon my library shelves there are
some hundreds of volumes dealing with political economy, and I don't
mind confessing to you that some of them I never have been able to
understand, though I have put no little effort and conscience into the
attempt. I have a suspicion that the authors of these books could not
understand them themselves. That the reason why they could not write
so that a man of fair intelligence and education could understand them
was the fact that they had no clear ideas to convey.

Now, in the first place, what do we mean by _Wealth_? Why, you say,
wealth is money and money is wealth. But that is only half true,
Jonathan. Suppose, for example, that an American millionaire crossing
the ocean be shipwrecked and find himself cast upon some desert
island, like another Robinson Crusoe, without food or means of
obtai