r even
ignorant of, its living form and spirit.

The particular department of that inquiry which concerns anyone who
touches the vast economic revolution produced by the Dissolution of
the monasteries is the comparison of values (as measured in the
precious metals) between the early sixteenth century and the early
twentieth.

No sensible man needs to be told that such a comparison is one of the
very numerous parts of historical inquiry in which a better result is
arrived at in proportion as the matter is more generally and largely
observed. It is one in which detail is more fatal to a man even than
inaccuracy, and it is one in which hardly a single observer who has
been really soaked in his subject has avoided the most ludicrous
conclusions.

Again, no man of common sense need be told that a rigid multiple is
absolutely impossible of discovery. The search for such a multiple is
like a search for an index number which shall apply to all the varying
economic habits of the modern world. One cannot say: "Multiply prices
by 10" or "Multiply prices by 20," and thus afford the modern reader a
sound basis; but one can say, after some observation: "Multiply by
such-and-such a multiple" (wherever very large and varied expenditure
is concerned) and you will certainly have a minimum; though how much
_more_ such expenditure may have represented in those very different
and far simpler social circumstances cannot be precisely determined.
What, then, is the rough multiple that will give us our minimum?

The inquiry has been prosecuted by more than one authority upon the
basis of wheat. One may say that wheat in normal years in the early
sixteenth century stood at about an eighth of wheat in what I may call
the normal years of the nineteenth, before the influx of Colonial
produce began to be serious, and before the depreciation of silver
combined with other causes to disturb prices.

Those who have taken wheat for their basis, recognising, as even they
must do, that 8 is far too low a multiple, are willing to grant 10,
and sometimes even 12, and this way of calculating, largely because it
is a ready rule, has entered into many books upon the Reformation. The
early Tudor penny is turned into the modern shilling.

But this basis of calculation is false, because the eating of wheaten
bread was not then the universal thing it is to-day. The English
proletarian of to-day is, in comparison with the large well-to-do
class of his fellow