The hope that poverty and ignorance may gradually be extinguished derives indeed much support from the steady progress of the working classes during the 19th century.

It is common to distinguish necessaries, comforts, and luxuries; the first class including all things required to meet wants which must be satisfied, while the latter consist of things that meet wants of a less urgent character.

Again, most of the chief distinctions marked by economic terms are differences not of kind but of degree.

Individual and national rights to wealth rest on the basis of civil and international law, or at least of custom that has the force of law.

Civilized countries generally adopt gold or silver or both as money.

The most valuable of all capital is that invested in human beings

I admit that these terms and the diagrams connected with them repel some readers, and fill others with the vain imagination that they have mastered difficult economics problems, when really they have done little more than learn the language in which parts of those problems can be expressed, and the machinery by which they can be handled. When the actual conditions of particular problems have not been studied, such knowledge is little better than a derrick for sinking oil-wells erected where there are no oil-bearing strata.