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 commercial storm leaves its path strewn with ruin. When it is over there is calm, but a dull, heavy calm.

Though a simple book can be written on selected topics, the central doctrines of economics are not simple and cannot be made so.

In common use almost every word has many shades of meaning, and therefore needs to be interpreted by the context.

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.

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