Of all the issues that confront the teachers of men, this is one of the most pressing and most insistent. Those who have taken upon themselves the task of seeking out and of expounding ideas have seldom faced a graver responsibility than that with which they are at the moment confronted. World facts demand world thoughts and world acts, before the human race can adopt saner, wiser and more enlightened economic policies. World thoughts and acts are impossible without world understanding. Therefore it is world understanding that is most imperatively needed in this critical hour. The people of the world have many things in common--economic interests, science, art, ideas, ideals. Ranged against these common interests there are the traditions, prejudices, hatreds, national barriers, sectarian differences, language obstacles and racial conflicts that have proved so effective in keeping the peoples separated. The common interests are the vital means of social advancement, and it is upon them that the emphasis of constructive thinking must be laid in an effort to promote world understanding. There is no need to apologize, then, for adding to groaning library shelves a book dealing with world economics, the purpose of which is to propose a plan that will pull together the scattered threads of world economic life. The time is so ripe for an examination of these problems that no man may consider himself informed who has not pondered them deeply, and no man may consider that he has done his duty as a member of this generation, who has not helped, at least in some degree, to unify the world's economic activities. Most particularly does this apply both to the statesmen and other public men who are striving to rejuvenate a dying order, and to the organizers and leaders of the new order that is even now pressing across the threshold of the western world. II. THE ECONOMIC MUDDLE 1. _Bankruptcy and Chaos_ World economic affairs are in a muddle. Famine has gripped Central Europe since 1918; unemployment is rife in Japan, Argentina, Britain, and the United States; business depression is felt in all of the principal industrial countries; producer and consumer alike find the world's economic machinery sadly out of gear. There have been innumerable predictions of "better times ahead," but among those who are closely connected with industry, there is serious concern over the future of the present economic system, while a formidable array of students and investigators agree with Bass and Moulton that: "It is not at all beyond the bounds of possibility that all of continental Europe might in the course of the next twenty-five years, or even sooner, go the way that Russia has already gone. It would not necessarily be through the instrumentality of Bolshevism; it might easily go in the Austrian way." ("America and the Balance Sheet of Europe." New York. Ronald Press. 1921. p. 138-9.)