ABC of the worker

Four or five years ago, the hazards of life put me in correspondence with a group of Parisian workers. They were little more than seventy, but each one represented a trade, and one guessed behind them an army of comrades. I did not see a single face to face: they wrote to me, I answered them a long enough letter which ran the workshops, then one of them, which seemed to exert a certain authority by its righteousness and its lights , a proposal that can be summarized as follows:
"Do you want to bond with us a strong and lasting friendship? Give us a service that neither our speakers nor our publicists have ever thought of offering us. Publish a little book that teaches us in a few hours of reading all that we need to know.
What we are asking of you is not an abridgement of universal science: there are so many things in the world that do not affect us from near and far! But common sense tells us that a man of good will could, with a little effort, grasp in two or three hundred pages all the practical truths which it is important for us to know. [...] "
I replied to my correspondent that I accepted the task [...] No one is supposed to ignore the civil and criminal laws that govern us, and really nobody ignores them in their main features. Why does not the vast majority of a people like ours ignore economic laws, eternal, immutable laws, inevitably derived from nature itself? ...

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