"I am afraid that this bald summary may create the impression that the book is simply a Socialist tract, a flagrant instance, that is to say, of the appropriation of a specific form of literary activity for the purposes of propaganda. That would be grossly unfair to the author and his work, which is not a treatise, but a pungent, intimate, scaring and profoundly realistic study of the lives, the environment, the opinions and outlook of the working-classes. The book does not step beyond the building trade, of which Tressall obviously possessed a meticulous knowledge, but the portrait of the builders is the portrait in miniature of the English working-classes. And the last thing in the world that Tressall did was to idealise them. The book is in fact a fierce, almost a savage attack upon their apathy, their shoddiness, their servility, their hopeless inadequacy to emancipate themselves from their wretched conditions, their willingness to perpetuate a system which degrades their class as a whole to the level of beasts of burden. And with what extraordinary insight and power of presenting and individualising his characters he does it! He simply lets them speak for themselves, as, at the dinner hour, they discuss politics, unemployment and poverty. There is no extenuation, no compromise, no romancing. These men are not abstractions or personifications of their creator's ideals or antipathies. They are the living human material of to-day, so debased by the squalor, futility, waste and despair of their lives, that they will ridicule any effort to make new and finer ones."