Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unbalanced quotation marks retained.

Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained; occurrences of inconsistent hyphenation have not been changed.

A vertical white blemish near the left margin partly-obscured the text of many page images. Transcribers were able to reconstruct the affected words, but the line also went through the second digit of some numbers, particularly in multiple occurrences of what was judged to be “£11,000,000”. It is possible that the correct value for some of those was “£14,000,000”.