spective of practical or special considerations — of the question of 
method, terminology and nomenclature and their standardisation 
in the matter of economic science; it will be found that scientific 
economic literature is full of inappropriate conceptions and ex- 
pressions, and that this in itself constitutes a very serious obstacle 
to understanding and peace. 
One might imagine that the position as regards international] 
terminology in the case of the fourth great intellectual domain, 
that of politics, was even worse than in the scientific, technical or 
economic domain; this, however, is not the case, since, as regards 
this point — more particularly in foreign politics — diplomatic 
relations have produced a more uniform international milieu, 
which has also been to the advantage of learning in general and 
of history in particular. It is true that in the domain of internal 
politics, important differences still exist as regards conception and 
expression, owing to the fact that in this case economic conditions, 
which are so imperfectly defined, play an important part. In every 
country internal social conditions develop differently and to some 
extent in a spirit of deliberate exclusiveness, and thus lead to more 
specifically national and hence less international conceptions and 
habits of speech. 
In order to explain in detail what the grogramme of an Inter- 
national Mining Committee would be, I subjoin the draft plan of 
work for such an institute. 
The Committee’s primary duties would be of a purely scientific 
character: it would have first 
a) to create, from the point of view of conception and language, 
the bases of an international economic understanding; it would 
have to agree upon a system applicable to mining economy, to 
define the degrees of exploitability in accordance with certain world 
economic rules, to establish a mining dictionary with the neces- 
sary terminology for all the principal languages, and to determine 
the nomenclature of the various kinds of useful minerals, world 
marks, customs tariff items, etc. It would have 
b) to standardise the statistical and cartographic bases, that is, 
weights and measures, prices and standards of values, customs and 
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