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Some fourteen years ago, I published a study of the Condition of England which received a kindly acceptance from the reviewers and those who honoured me by reading it. The world of which I then wrote has vanished in the greatest secular catastrophe which has tormented mankind since the fall of Rome. I have been invited to write a similar volume concerning the condition of an England but struggling with difficulty to survive and re-establish civilisation, in a Europe where it is still uncertain whether civilisation as we understood it will endure. And the result is the present volume.

I have endeavoured to follow the conditions which I laid down in my former examination. I have attempted diagnosis——of health or disease. I have not suggested a cure for remediable maladies, for directly I commence to advocate a cure, I pass into the region of political controversy, which in such studies as these I wish to avoid. Any one interested enough to demand my own solutions of certain evils here described must find them in the writings and speeches which I am compelled to make as an advocate in the world of actual affairs. And in this volume, as in the case of its predecessor, I would like to believe that the work is one of detachment; that I am examining, impartially and disinterestedly, a world in change; and that no one would be able to ascertain from these pages what my actual political or social opinions were, or to which, if any, party in the State I owed allegiance.