Excerpt from The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal, Vol. 182: For July, 1895, to October, 1895Replying to the first of these questions, we must give as our answer the fact which we have already suggested - that for the most part the complaints are without any founda tion that the country was never, in fact, so prosperous as at the present time, whatever seeds of industrial decay may have been sown; that at no time in our history have we ever made so much material progress as in the last fifty years, while the progress within the last few years has been at least at the average rate of the fifty; that, in short, the usual language about industrial depres sion at the present time is either a blunder, the mistake of those who come as amateurs, like Mr. Keir Hardie, to the study of economic phenomena and who generalise rashly and illogically from a few facts only; or it is worse, the deliberate exaggeration of faddists and others for their own purposes, assisted by the perennial tendency to gloom and exaggeration in these matters which characterises apparently the English race.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at forgottenbooks.comThis 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.