To H. S. INTRODUCTION TO THE AMERICAN EDITION The case which is argued in these pages includes the examination of certain concrete matters which very obviously and directly touch important American interests--American foreign trade and investments, the exchanges, immigration, armaments, taxation, industrial unrest and the effect of these on social and political organisation. Yet the greatest American interest here discussed is not any one of those particular issues, or even the sum of them, but certain underlying forces which more than anything else, perhaps, influence all of them. The American reader will have missed the main bearing of the argument elaborated in these pages unless that point can be made clear. Let us take a few of the concrete issues just mentioned. The opening chapter deals with the motives which may push Great Britain still to struggle for the retention of predominant power at sea. The force of those motives is obviously destined to be an important factor in American politics, in determining, for instance, the amount of American taxation. It bears upon the decisions which American voters and American statesmen will be called upon to make in American elections within the next few years. Or take another aspect of the same question: the peculiar position of Great Britain in the matter of her dependence upon foreign food. This is shown to be typical of a condition common to very much of the population of Europe, and brings us to the problem of the pressure of population in the older civilisations upon the means of subsistence. That "biological pressure" is certain, in some circumstances, to raise for America questions of immigration, of relations generally with foreign countries, of defence, which American statesmanship will have to take into account in the form of definite legislation that will go on to American Statute books. Or, take the general problem of the economic reconstruction of Europe, with which the book is so largely occupied. That happens to bear, not merely on the expansion of American trade, the creation of new markets, that is, and on the recovery of American debts, but upon the preservation of markets for cotton, wheat, meat and other products, to which large American communities have in the past looked, and do still look, for their prosperity and even for their solvency. Again, dealing with the manner in which the War has affected the economic organisation of the European society, the writer has been led to describe the process by which preparation for modern war has come to mean, to an increasing degree, control by the government of the national resources as a whole, thus setting up strong tendencies towards a form of State Socialism. To America, herself facing a more far-reaching organisation of the national resources for military purposes than she has known in the past, the analysis of such a process is certainly of very direct concern. Not less