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• Preface
• Note.
• Wealth
• Chapter I: The Subject-matter of Economics
• Chapter II: The Fundamental Conditions of Wealth For Isolated Man and For Society
• Chapter III: Co-operation, Or Combination and Division of Labour
• Chapter IV: Population
• Chapter V: The Social Order
• Chapter VI: The Controlling Power of Demand
• Chapter VII: The Control of Provision For the Future
• Chapter VIII: Continuous Power to Demand, Or Income
• Chapter IX: The Classification of Incomes
• Chapter X: The Division of Income Between Owners and Workers
• Chapter XI: Incomes From Ownership of Property
• Chapter XII: Incomes From Work
• Chapter XIII: The Relation Between Individual Income and Individual Wealth
• Chapter XIV: The Wealth of Nations

NOTE.

IN 1913, when the passage near the bottom of page 87 was written, no one would have been inclined to deny that the aggregate cost of being “prepared” for war had “come to exceed enormously the cost of war itself.” The gigantic cost of the present war may seem now to suggest that the adverb “enormously” should at least be modified. But readers must bear in mind that if the system which prevailed before the war is to continue, the cost of preparedness will then be not on the old scale, but on the new and immensely higher scale suggested by the experience of modem war which society now enjoys. There is, indeed, no reason why, in that case, international competition in preparedness should not absorb every particle of human energy that is left after providing the barest necessaries of efficiency (in war work and propagation of the race) for able-bodied adults and children. This, at any rate, would be the ideal which governments would have to hold up to their probably—in the long run—reluctant subjects.

February 1917.