Excerpt from Les Mis rables, Vol. 1: Fantine So long as there shall exist, by virtue of law and custom, a social damnation artificially creating hells in the midst of civilization, and complicating the destiny which is divine with a fatality which is human; so long as the three problems of the age - the degradation of man through poverty, the ruin of woman through hunger, the crippling of children through ignorance - are not solved; so long as in certain regions social asphyxia is possible, in other words, and from a still wider point of view, so long as ignorance and Wretchedness exist on the earth, books like this cannot be use less. 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.