PREFACE


The book, an English translation of which is here republished, was first
issued in Germany in 1845. The author, at that time, was young, twenty-
four years of age, and his production bears the stamp of his youth with
its good and its faulty features, of neither of which he feels ashamed.
It was translated into English, in 1885, by an American lady, Mrs. F.
Kelley Wischnewetzky, and published in the following year in New York.
The American edition being as good as exhausted, and having never been
extensively circulated on this side of the Atlantic, the present English
copyright edition is brought out with the full consent of all parties
interested.

For the American edition, a new Preface and an Appendix were written in
English by the author. The first had little to do with the book itself;
it discussed the American Working-Class Movement of the day, and is,
therefore, here omitted as irrelevant, the second--the original
preface--is largely made use of in the present introductory remarks.

The state of things described in this book belongs to-day, in many
respects, to the past, as far as England is concerned. Though not
expressly stated in our recognised treatises, it is still a law of modern
Political Economy that the larger the scale on which Capitalistic
Production is carried on, the less can it support the petty devices of
swindling and pilfering which characterise its early stages. The
pettifogging business tricks of the Polish Jew, the representative in
Europe of commerce in its lowest stage, those tricks that serve him so