Now suppose that the Government of Iceland were to want to build a new harbour for the capital, which is on the sea, and in order to get the money were either to confiscate the wealth of certain rich people or to tax all the people--supposing it wanted, for instance, £400,000 in order to complete the work. And supposing the people of Australia similarly wanted to build a harbour and also wanted £400,000 to be got in the same way. The index number is the same in both places. An ounce of gold will roughly purchase the same amount of things in both places, for the index number at any moment is much the same all over the white world, measured in gold, and we may imagine the categories of purchasable things to be much the same in both places. Yet the social value of the £400,000 is quite different in Iceland from what it is in Australia. In Iceland it means taking an average of £100 from each of the poor families--if you get it by taxation--or the confiscation of all the wealth of the very few rich men there may be. But in Australia it means no more than the taking of about 8s. from each family, and that from an average family income much higher than the average family income in Iceland. Under this heading the social value of £400,000 in Iceland is enormous and in Australia is small. If Iceland tried to build such a harbour it could hardly do so. The economic effort would be very great, and if it succeeded it would fill a big place in the history of the island. In Australian history it would pass almost unnoticed. Now let us add the influence of all these three points together, and we shall see that there is a vast difference between the social value of money in the time of Henry VIII., when the monasteries were dissolved, and the social value of the same amount of money to-day. We shall see, for instance, why the King, taking away the annual revenues of the Monastery of Westminster and keeping them for himself, made such a prodigious splash, although the actual amount in pounds, or weight of gold, in which the income of Westminster Abbey could then be measured was only £4,000 a year. In the first place, you must multiply by 24, so that the actual income or annual purchasing value in wheat, beef, rye, pork, beer, which was confiscated, was nearly £100,000 in our money. Then you must remember that it took place in a community where there was a very much smaller number of purchasable categories; that is, where people had a very much small number of “sets of things” upon which to spend money.