The first step in economic liberation is to free man from the more savage phases of the life struggle--the struggle against nature: the struggle with other men. Since those far-off times when men lived by tearing away clusters of nuts, by picking berries, by digging roots, by snaring fish and by clubbing game, they have been compelled to wrest from nature the means of subsistence. In this struggle, there have been the terrible phantoms of hunger, thirst, cold, darkness and physical suffering of every sort, driving men on. He who won in the contest with nature was able to escape the worst of these miseries, but he who lost was tortured by them as long as life remained in his body. The race is saddled, even to-day, by an oppressive fear of these physical hardships that makes the strongest a willing servant of any agency that will promise to ward them off. The first victory that men must gain in their battle for economic liberation, will be won when hunger, thirst, cold, darkness and other aspects of physical suffering are banished from the lives of all people as effectively as yellow fever and cholera have been banished from the western world during recent generations. This end has already been attained for the favored few in most countries, but famine still stalks periodically among the peoples of Asia, and even Europe, since the Great War, has felt its grip. Among the industrial workers of the imperial countries, and among the citizens of the exploited countries, the wolf is a far more frequent visitor than is the fatted calf. Liberation from this widespread physical hardship can be achieved by producing enough of the necessaries of life to feed, clothe and house all of the people of the world, and by supplementing an adequate production by a system of distribution that will eliminate hunger and cold. Machine industry has made such an achievement possible. It only remains for a world economic organization to co-ordinate the resources, the productive machinery and the labor, and to distribute the commodities produced to those who need them. The conflict with nature is but one aspect of the primitive struggle in which men are engaged. In addition, there is the struggle of man against man; not to aid, to emulate, to excel, but to rob, cripple and destroy. The existing economic system is built upon the assumed desirability of a struggle whose outward manifestations are: (1) competition between economic groups; (2) the class war between owners and workers, and (3) wars between the nations. Throughout the business world one establishment seeks to build up its organization by wiping out its competitors; one class seeks to win supremacy at the expense of a rival class, and one nation seeks to found its greatness on the prostrate remains of those opposing nations that it has been able to overthrow. These three phases of competition are accompanied by three forms of war--the economic war, the class war and international wars.