Of fully equal importance with material wealth in determining the economic power of a people is the _social system_ under which the nation lives.

This is the term applied to the whole complex of institutions and arrangements in which and by which people live together in society.

It is the embodiment of the opinions, ideas, and habits of life inherited by each generation from its forbears.

It is, indeed, a people's whole state of civilization with its political, economic, intellectual, scientific, religious, and esthetic aspects.
The most important economic aspect of the existing system is, broadly speaking, the institution of private property.

So closely connected with this that they are hardly more than different phases of the same thing, are the use of money (the monetary economy), the wage system, and competition as a mode of distribution.