Excerpt from Engines of Social Progress There are no politics in this book. A similar claim has been put forward by many writers, and, as a rule, it has not been substantiated, for politics are all pervading, and more often than not blight the fairest fruit of human endeavour. There is in the popular mind an apparently hopeless confusion of politics and economics, because the latter have become the toy of politicians - their arsenal of argument and the plat form oi their promises; parties have been formed nominally according to the natural division of men into schools of thought. Little by little expediency has compelled the inclusion of theories that the original school would perhaps never have admitted, so that certain groups are finally committed to certain politics, and that men, originally their opponents on vastly different issues, find themselves naturally inclined to combat the introduction of measures which the founders of the party might have sup ported. Yet nothing is further removed from politics. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.