THE book, an English translation of which is here republished, wasfirst issued in Germany in 1845.The author, at that time,wasyoung, twenty-four years of age,and his production bears thestamp of his youth with its good and its faulty features, of neitherof which he feels ashamed.It was translated into English, in1885,by an American lady,Mrs. F.Kelley Wischnewetzky, andpublished in the following year in New York.The Americanedition being as good as exhausted, and having never been exten-sively circulated on this side of the Atlantic, the present Englishcopyright edition is brought out with the full consent of all partiesinterested.

For the American edition, a new Preface and an Appendix werewritten in English by the author.The first had little to do withthe book itself ; it discussed the American working-Class Move-ment of the day, and is, therefore, here omitted as irrelevant,thesecond-the original preface--is largely made use of in thepresent introductory remarks.

The state of things described in this book belongs to-day, inmany respects,to the past,as far as England isconcerned.Though not expressly stated in our recognised treatises, it is stilla law of modern Political Economy that the larger the scale onwbich Capitalistic Production is carried on, the less can it sup-port the petty devices of swindling and pilfering which characteriseits early stages.The pettifogging business tricks of the PolishJew, the representative in Europe of commerce in its lowest stage,those tricks that serve him so well in his own country, and aregenerally practised there, he finds to be out of date and out ofplace when he comes to Hamburg or Berlin ; and, again,the com-mission agent, who hails from Berlin or Hamburg, Jew or Chris-tian, after frequenting the Manchester Exchange for a few months,finds out that, in order to buy cotton yarn or cloth cheap, he, too,had better drop those slightly more refined but still miserablewiles and subterfuges which are considered the acme of clevernessin his native country.The fact is,those tricks do not pay anylonger in a large market,where time is money,and where a cer-tain standard of commercial morality is unavoidably developed,purely as a means of saving time and trouble.And it is the samewith the relation between the manufacturer and his" hands.”