“ The extreme violence of his language contributed not a little to embitter the relations between Italy and President Wilson. During the Nitti regime D'Annunzio came to personify the patriotic reaction against the Government's policy; while he became the idol of a small body of enthusiasts, he attracted the sympathies of an ever-increasing portion of all the best elements in the country. The Fiume dispute symbolized in his mind the whole conflict between Italy's aspirations and the selfish greed and ingratitude of her Allies. ”

“ Yet it is necessary, in the interests of a publication which is essentially educational, to add one proviso. It remains as true as ever that contemporary human life and interests are organically related not only to the immediate developments of one preceding decade but to those of a succession of earlier decades and epochs, back to the abysses of time. The great Drama is of the Ages, and can only be appreciated with all its Acts on record. The eye which looks only at the passing scene is too often colour-blind. The roots of the Post-War World go down into the Pre-War World. ”

“ The tie of each customer to a particular retailer was the essence of the scheme, the main safeguard against fraud, and the basis of distribution. Behind rationing as the public saw it—a paper affair of application forms, counterfoils and coupons—was a not less extensive and intricate machinery for distribution of the appropriate supplies through all the complex channels of trade week by week to every retailer in the country. ”

“ As long as there was an immense amount of war-risk insurance to be effected, and values of ships and commodities were inflated, there was sufficient business to feed a much-increased and hungry market. When trade became extremely quiet, some of the newcomers thought that they must continue to secure a large share of the business, and the only way they could do so, in competition with the older and more firmly established offices, was to reduce rates of premium. ”

“ Of the conditions which facilitate the determination of a reasonable marginal cost for price-fixing, a knowledge of the requirements of the market, or in war-time a knowledge of the needs of the Government and its agencies, is most important. Price-fixing in the United States was handicapped by uncertainty as to the quantity which it was desired to have produced, which uncertainty was in some cases due both to ignorance of the available stocks and to uncertainty as to future requirements. While prices were generally fixed on the basis of cost, there were necessarily many exceptions. ”

“ Financing of foreign trade has been on so abnormal a basis and the trade itself has been so one-sided that it would be difficult to form a conclusive estimate of the effect of reserve banking in that connexion further than to say that without the general underlying strength which had been afforded by the system it would probably have been impossible for the United States to finance any such enormous volume of trade as it actually took care of. The effect of the Reserve System upon interest and discount rates has undoubtedly been to stabilize and harmonize them. ”

“ To-day, on the other hand, the whole atmosphere of scholarship and thought has temporarily been vitiated by the world upheaval, and the coöperation enlisted for the Eleventh Edition is unattainable under present conditions. It is not too much to say that the service done by the Encyclopædia Britannica for the public, by bringing together in the Eleventh Edition its unique combination of the world’s ripest judgments on every sort of subject, could not have been rendered to this generation at all if that Edition had not been completed before the war. ”

“ Still, it would be wrong to class Neuve Chapelle among British defeats. The troops were undoubtedly encouraged by seeing that German positions could be stormed and the captured ground held against powerful counter-attacks. Nearly 1,700 prisoners had been taken and the German losses had exceeded the British. Rifles, artillery and machine-guns had found splendid targets, and the German battalions who had shown themselves in the open had been shot down in masses. It was felt that another attack in which the lessons of the battle could be turned to good effect might lead to far-reaching results. ”

“ As an urgent social and economic problem the conception of “profiteering” was a new one as well as the name attached to it, since the possibility of unreasonably high profits being reaped on a large scale to the public detriment from the sale of articles in common use was a direct outcome of the conditions of disorganized trade and world-shortage of commodities which resulted from the World War. It is clear that under normal economic conditions high profits do not necessarily involve high prices, but may even be obtained as a result of greater efficiency of organization or production. ”

“ The American people at no time in their history have been out of intimate touch with shipbuilding and navigation.
Unlike other nations the United States has steadily maintained an important and increasing waterborne domestic commerce capable of holding its own with formidable railway competition. This coastwise commerce, including the trade with Alaska, Porto Rico and Hawaii, by an unshaken national policy, has been reserved entirely to American vessels, and has had a significant bearing on the development of the American merchant marine. ”

“ As all students of war agree, within the army of a combatant nation, unity of control is essential to secure the most effective execution of military operations. In theory, it is equally desirable in all circumstances. There is, however, a difficulty inherent in applying the principle of unity of control to Allied nations. This difficulty lies in the incidence of responsibility. For example, if the British armies are placed under the command of a French general, the British commander cannot be held responsible to the nation. ”

“ The business of the British insurance offices is world-wide, mainly as far as fire, marine and workmen's compensation insurance are concerned. London is a great school for insurance, and credit for much of the development of the business belongs to the underwriters of Lloyd's. Underwriters acting for themselves, or for a few friends, represented in a syndicate, doubtless feel freer to act than the managers of companies who have to report to boards of directors. ”

“ There is as much variety in the method of playing dance music to-day as in the dances themselves. Dance bands therefore vary considerably in skill, as might be expected, and the best known command very high salaries. The skill of a modern dance band lies in two essentials: first, good rhythm; and secondly, cleverness in extemporising variations on the tune by the different executors.
The effect of the American dances has not yet permeated the social scale, and the masses among whom dancing has always been a popular pastime, and they continue to prefer the dances of the 10th century. ”

“ During the war period the ordinary sources of supply were so disturbed that pre-war kinds and qualities were no longer in the market (in the Economist index number only 19 out of the 44 quotations included were not subject to some modification of kind) ; and a statement of prices is generally taken as meaning the price at which a purchaser can obtain the goods he desires and at which a merchant is willing to sell, but in the time of control and rationing these conditions did not obtain, and the price was fixed by other conditions than those which influence a free market. ”

“ If, in connexion with the values of shipping, there seemed to be some weakening of the standard of morality, there was an obvious lowering of the ideals in other forms of commerce. Claims in respect of cargo losses were on an enormous scale, and were attributed in large degree to pilferage of goods throughout the world. Legal decisions have been held that there is a distinction between robbery with force and sneak-thieving, or pilferage. The ordinary marine-insurance policy covers the risk of robbery by force, but the risk of theft and pilferage has usually been specifically excluded. ”

“ When a controlling part of the supply of any given product is produced by concerns which are not completely integrated, especially as to the earlier stages of the industry, it is practically necessary, in price-fixing, to control the price of the chief semi-finished products; but when a controlling proportion of a product comes from producers who are more or less completely integrated, this necessity does not exist, although some protection may be required for independent producers in the earlier stages. ”

“ An uncompromising realist in his subjects, Degas found in the art of the Far East a starting-point for combining the most ordinary and ungraceful attitudes of everyday life into an original, intricate and harmonious design. ”

“ The chief reasons, however, for the preeminence of the United States in the use of motor-cars had nothing to do with the World War. In the first place America is a land of magnificent distances; in many sections towns and cities are far apart, and long trips must often be made over the public roads, for which purpose horse vehicles are quite unsatisfactory. Secondly, petrol (in the United States called gasoline) , the fuel commonly used for motor vehicles, is a native product, comparatively cheap and plentiful. Thirdly, per capita wealth is greater than in most countries and well distributed. ”

“ Until the war broke out the progress of the offices had been so steady and their success so great that the likelihood of their being unable to distribute profits hardly entered into the minds of most people. Life-assurance agents, basing their calculations on pre-war experience, were quite able to reason that the participating policies, in many cases, represented much better value than the non-participating contracts. The faith of the public in participating policies was rudely shaken by the experience of the war. ”

“ During the World War the industrial assurance companies in England felt the heavy strain of war mortality claims. They were also adversely affected by the Courts (Emergency Powers) Act, which provided, in effect, that the companies were required to keep in force all policies should the assured be unable, owing to the results of the war, to pay the premiums. There was good reason to believe that the Act was much abused. Practically all those who were not in the fighting forces secured the advantage of the high wages ruling at a time when unemployment practically did not exist. ”

“ The crowning success of the whole British Supply system during the World War is undoubtedly the fact that not only were the troops, in spite of their great number, the best fed that the world has ever seen, but from a cost point of view possibly the cheapest fed, considering the enormously inflated world prices ”

“ That night the German Seventeenth Army withdrew its two right corps in haste behind the Canal du Nord, where they again faced round for a renewed stand. Their losses had been heavy; ii divisions had been defeated with a loss of close on 11,000 prisoners and many guns; the artificial defences had not held up or even appreciably checked the British advance, which now threatened to turn from the N. the whole of the Hindenburg line.
Fortunately for the Germans the Canal du Nord proved a sufficiently formidable obstacle to give pause to the First Army's progress. ”

“ The aim of eugenics is therefore not primarily the collection of facts, but the construction and advocacy of practical proposals. The character of these proposals will of course depend on our conception of the laws of heredity, but the study of these laws forms the subject matter of the science of genetics. Genetics is a department of biology; and the last word in all controversies connected with heredity must rest with the biologist. ”

“ In order to provide against the risk to the workman of uninsured employers proving unable to meet the obligations incurred under the Act, it was proposed that every employer other than the Crown, a local or public authority, a statutory company, or householder in respect of servants not employed by him for the purpose of his trade or business, should be required to insure against the workmen's compensation risk. Employers with an annual wage-roll exceeding £20,000 were to be entitled to claim exemption from compulsory insurance upon compliance with prescribed conditions. ”

“ Moreover, it is as true to-day as ever it was that the weakest point in any armour is the joint. A heavy shell striking a plate near an edge or corner is liable to break off and carry away a piece of the plate with disastrous results, and it is therefore desirable to eliminate this risk as far as possible by reducing the number of joints to a minimum, that is to say by increasing the size of the individual plates. At the present time the size of plate capable of being placed on a ship is only limited by the carrying capacity of the railways. ”

“ A first feeble step in this direction may be found in the regulation which until recently was enforced in English poorhouses, forbidding husbands and wives to live together, but public opinion would now be opposed to any extension of this principle: people generally are so obsessed with the liberty of the subject that the liberty of the depraved and worthless to pollute society by a stream of worthless progeny has not been seriously challenged. ”

“ The process of rationing, therefore, has two sides negative and positive: the negative side of preventing any individual from obtaining, by purchase or otherwise, more than the authorized quantity of the rationed article, and the positive side of making it possible for each individual in fact to obtain that quantity. It is thus a problem both of restriction and of distribution, and the success of any rationing system may be judged even more by the degree to which the positive side is carried out, than by the completeness with which the prohibition upon excessive consumption is enforced. ”

“ Both Italy and France produced a larger proportion of their cereals at home, and required less meat. In Italy even sugar was mainly home grown. For the food controllers of Central Powers, questions of importation hardly arose. Their main problem and one which they solved only to a limited degree was that of inducing the farmer to give up a fair proportion of his produce at the official price to the public authorities. They seem, indeed, to have been considerably less successful than the British food controllers in getting agreement with the agricultural population on production and prices ”

“ One of the principal problems of the Government was the prevention, or at least mitigation, of fluctuations of prices for food products in order, first, to safeguard farmers against sudden and disastrous reductions of price such as would discourage production; second, to protect consumers against undue rises which would bring hardship to wage-earners and the industrial population generally, cause strikes and impair war-time efficiency. ”

“ The great rise in the price of milk must be attributed to the high cost of cattle food, which was very scarce in the period of restricted imports; elaborate arrangements were made to increase the supply by curtailing the consumption of cream and the manufacture of butter and cheese. Milk was not rationed except by informal local arrangements. Not much attention should be paid to the prices of butter and cheese after 1916, since during a long period they were not freely obtainable, and the Government having taken control distributed them at prices which would meet their cost. ”

“ Thus, in the United States, oil companies succeeded in virtually preventing any price-fixing on the ground that the exorbitant prices that prevailed were necessary to stimulate production; while lumber, copper and cement associations by concerted and persistent activity obtained prices that were unnecessarily high. In still other cases every effort had been made to defraud the Government in respect of excess profits taxes, to enable a business to “retain” profits larger than lawful. ”

“ The plight of Serbia during the first winter of the war, harried first by the Austrian invasion and then by the typhus epidemic, was so terrible that hospital after hospital was sent out from Great Britain by the Serbian Relief Fund, the British Red Cross Society, the Wounded Allies Relief Committee and the Scottish Women's Hospitals. All these took out trained nurses and many had women doctors, but, with the exception of the Scottish Women's Hospitals, the only two units under women administrators were financed by the Serbian Relief Fund. ”