FOOTNOTES
1 From the Latin word “Fiat” = “Let it be so.” As though the Government had said: “This is not a piece of gold, only a piece of paper. But I say it is to be taken as gold. So I order. Let it be so.”
2 It is important to keep our ideas rigidly clear on this point. You can exchange a piece of fertile land for some set of values. Yet it is not wealth. It is not matter transposed from a condition where it is less useful to a condition where it is more useful to man. See the definitions in the first chapter, “What is wealth?”
3 “Enjoyment” does not mean, in this connection, pleasure, happiness. It is a conventional phrase to mean “consumption not directed to the making of further wealth?” Thus the wealth consumed at a boring dinner party is consumed in “enjoyment.”
4 A Strike is a modern English word (only used where the English language is spoken), and signifying the refusal of the Free labourers to sell their labour for the amount hitherto given. They cease work, thereby interrupting the profits of the Capitalist who furnishes them with food, clothing, etc., in the shape of wages. They do so in the hope of compelling him, by loss of profits during their idleness, to pay them more.
A Lock-out is a modern English word now used all over the world to signify an action of the Capitalist refusing to pay his workmen what they have hitherto received, and hoping to starve them into accepting lower wages by “locking them out” of his factory until they submit.
Strikes are only possible when the labourers have accumulated some capital on which to live during the struggle. This they accumulate by contributions to the common fund of a “Trades Union” while still in employment. A Lock-out is only possible from the fact that such funds are small and soon exhausted.
5 In theory Parliament is stronger than the banks, but Parliament no longer counts as a real governing power. The banks are far more powerful than Parliament.
6 This very sensible tax was invented by Disraeli in England about a lifetime ago.
7 Silver and gold were used together, but gold alone will serve as a test.
8 A simple daily example of an amateur index number is the housewife’s idea of “cost of living.” She finds that, for the purchase of her home, a great deal of bread, a little butter, more cheese, so much for clothing, rent, etc., 40s. to-day go about as far as 20s. in 1913 before the war. In other words she is “taking 1913 as a base and establishing an index number of 200 for 1923.”