Excerpt from Science of Statistics, Vol. 2: Statistics and Economics The Economic Organisation. Among the complicated phenomena of social life, those institutions and arrangements by which man satisfies his material wants are perhaps the most important. The economic is the foundation of all social organisation. For until man is able to supply himself with the means of subsistence, it is idle to expect any development of the higher and more refined sides of civilisation. The economic wants must be satisfied before the higher intellectual and moral wants can be. And even after the development of civilisation, the particular form of economic institutions conditions and affects the whole social organisation. An industrial population will not have the same political forms of administration and the same policy as a nation composed of agriculturalists. The influence will, indeed, often extend to the more refined manifestations of civilisation, such as the artistic, the ethical, and the religious. For all study of institutions, therefore, it is necessary to know at least the general outline of the economic organisation. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.