ABSTRACT
This volume is an essay, which will undertake to comment rather generally on a considerable body of evidence to be more fully presented in the subsequent volumes comprising this work. In the later volumes we shall deal with the development of charitable institutions in the several counties included in this study, while in the present volume we shall be concerned with the interpretation of data aggregated from the individual counties and described conveniently, if inexactly, as applying to England as a whole. We should now, however, discuss the historical and statistical method employed in the accumulation, the aggregating, and the interpretation of the large mass of somewhat unruly evidence on which the study rests.
