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CHAPTER I. T may be doubted whether there is in England any class of men which, as a class, has produced greater results and attracted less attention than the navvies. Some of my readers will doubt, perhaps, whether I am justified in speaking of them as a class distinct in any sense from the working class in general. Others, on the other hand, may, I fear, have learnt to think of them as not only excluded from any recognised class of men, but as hardly belonging to the race of man at all. My chief objects in this and subsequent papers will be—first, to claim for my navvy friends a place, and a very respectable place, in the genus homo, and next, to show that I am justified in speaking of them as forming a distinct species of working men—a species, too, of more than common interest, one that has been formed in our own time by a process of natural selection, the survival of the fittest; one that appears to have become more distinct and better defined since its first development. It is also one that may justly complain of neglect, although claiming, and ready amply to reward, the attention of the student in human nature, of the philanthropist, and above all, of the Christian and the evangelist. There are some points of resemblance