The most dangerous moment in any campaign is not the battle itself — it is the hour before it begins, when a leader decides whether to begin at all. Valluvar devotes an entire chapter not to fighting but to weighing. The word 'vali' — strength, force, capacity — appears relentlessly, but never once in praise of brute power. Instead, it appears on a scale. Weigh the task against yourself. Weigh yourself against your enemy. Weigh your allies against his. Then — and only then — move. The chapter opens with a four-part calculus of force, ascends through the confidence of those who measure correctly, and then plunges into a gallery of ruin: kings broken mid-campaign, self-admirers racing toward collapse, axles snapping under featherweight loads piled too high. At its center, Valluvar executes the chapter's sharpest pivot — from military strength to fiscal strength — and the final four kurals become a treatise on spending, saving, and the quiet catastrophe of generosity without arithmetic. The chapter's argument is austere and unforgiving: power that does not know its own limits is not power at all.