Excerpt from The Ancient Lowly: A History of the Ancient Working People From the Earliest Known Period to the Adoption of Christianity by Constantine Much of its contents is new. The ideas that lay at the bottom of the. Ancient competitive system, though in their day thoroughly understood, have been so systematically attacked and gnawed away during our nearly years' trial of the new institution, that men now, no longer comprehend them. The whole may strike the reader as news. Much of it indeed, reads like a revelation from a sealed book; and we may not at first be able to comprehend it as a natural effect of a cause. 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.