I will give you one instance, to prove this, which is very striking and which happened in my own experience. A man I knew gave in his income tax returns a few years ago. He had a secretary at home to whom he paid a fairly large salary, and he also used a secretary in town. Their salaries came out of money which he had earned in business but appeared in his taxable general income, for he was not allowed to take it off as an expense. Meanwhile, both the secretary in the country and the secretary in town were paying tax on _their_ salaries, though they came out of a total income which had already paid taxes, and anyone making an assessment of the total income of England would certainly have written down from the official books: “Mr. Blank, so much a year; his secretary A--, so much a year; his secretary B--, so much a year,” and added up the total. Yet it is clear that the money put down to A and B was imaginary. I cannot tell you the thousands of ways in which this simple case of overlapping goes on in modern England, for it would be too long to explain, and I have only given you very simple instances, but you may be certain that the economic imaginaries of this kind form at least a quarter of the supposed income of the country. If there were no other form of imaginaries than this it would be very simple to understand them, and perhaps allow for them in making an estimate of total wealth. Unfortunately, there are any number of different forms much more difficult to seize and cropping up like mushrooms everywhere more and more in a complicated and active society. For instance: you have (2) the economic imaginary due to _luxurious expenditure_.