INTRODUCTION 
Taxis volume presents, under the general title of ‘ Insurance’, 
five separate contributions by different writers, all of whom 
have been a large part of that which they describe. To these 
is added a sixth paper on the National Savings Movement, 
a subject that could not be omitted from any full economic 
history of the war and that falls perhaps more appropriately 
in this volume than in any other. A few words of introduction 
illustrating the pointsof contrast or likeness between the various 
topics thus assembled may not be out of place. 
Insurance is a sharing of risks. It assumes a danger 
threatening a number of individuals, in such a way that the 
danger is certain actually to strike a fairly definite proportion 
of them, while it cannot be determined beforehand which 
individuals will be struck. Provision for this danger is appro- 
priately made by arranging for payments in respect of all 
the individuals threatened, to form a fund out of which com- 
pensation is given to those to whom the threat comes home. 
For three main types of risk considered in this volume— 
premature death, loss of property by fire, and loss of ships or 
cargo at sea—insurance developed voluntarily as a business 
practice. For two others—sickness and unemployment—a new 
institution of © social insurance’, conducted by the State and 
resting on compulsion, had come into being in the last years 
before the war. In all these five fields of insurance the war 
produced violent disturbance, upsetting all previous calcula- 
tions and calling for new measures. 
The State scheme of insurance against war risks at sea, 
which is described in the first paper by Sir Norman Hill, was 
in substance a war measure, The risk with which it dealt— 
damage by warlike action—had been habitually excluded in 
all ordinary contracts of marine insurance. The fear that 
outbreak of hostilities might drive every British ship to harbour 
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