This chapter says what the article reads and how. Its contribution to the debates is indirect: it sets out why the two sides of the comparison are unequal, a text of the authority itself for 301 and a later narrative for 1720, and why that inequality is part of what the article finds.
3.1The two texts and what they are
The text for 301 is the preamble of the edict in the English translation that Roland Kent published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review in 1920. Kent says that he used the translation by Rolfe and Tarbell so far as it went, with verbal changes of his own, and he sets the preamble out in eighteen numbered sentences, one to a paragraph. The study's copy is an uncorrected machine reading of a scan of Kent's article, not checked against the page images, and the Latin of the preamble is not among the texts it holds. Every account of the edict's wording given here is therefore an account of Kent's English of 1920, not of the edict's Latin, and a reading that turns on a single word turns on Kent's choice of that word.
The text for 1720 is the opening of the chapter "The South-Sea Bubble" in Charles Mackay's Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, first published in 1841. The study's copy is a volunteer transcription of the illustrated edition of 1852, not checked against a page image, whose wording may differ from the first printing, which was not consulted. The excerpt runs from Mackay's epigraph, lines of Pope, through the company's founding, its trade, the conversion of debt proposed in early 1720, the passage of the bill through both Houses, and the first rush to buy; it stops before the collapse. No Act of Parliament, proclamation or company document of 1720 is among the texts this study holds. The inequality is plain: for 301 the study reads the words of the authority that acted; for 1720 it reads a writer looking back across more than a century, who wrote for a general audience and, as the scholarship read here has it, without careful research into the sources. What Mackay says happened in 1720 is given here as Mackay's account, never as a fact this study vouches for.
The inequality is also an opportunity: reading the authority's own justification beside a later narrator's account lets the study ask whether blame looks different from inside the act and from outside it. What it cannot do is say what the authorities of 1720 themselves wrote about the cause of the trouble.
Because both copies are uncorrected, neither text is quoted. This study gives their sense in its own words, in their order, naming the sentence of the preamble or the part of Mackay's chapter it draws on; block quotes are reserved for Skeptron's records, which are quoted word for word.
3.2The records
Skeptron is a studio in the RISCON family that publishes questions about the past drawn from public records. Each of its history cases gives a dated event, a short scenario, and five questions with Skeptron's answers: the date of the record, a concrete fact, the boundary of what can be judged, a calendar check, and the condition of a later comparison, together with the public source it checked. The records are modern platform summaries, written in Korean in September 2026 and read here in an English translation made once for the study. They are not documents of the time and do not claim to be.
The record of 301 names as its source a collection of excerpts from the Roman economic edicts in a university's online sourcebook, checked on 14 September 2026. The record of 1720 names the Bank of England's historical chronology, checked on 13 September 2026. Neither names Kent or Mackay. Where a record and a text differ, both are given.
Each record also carries sentences that recur across Skeptron's history cases with only names and dates changed, which the studio lists as the record's frame. They state Skeptron's method rather than anything a case shows. One example from the record of 301:
Do not merge announcement, decision, implementation, and results into the same event.
This article does not count such sentences as findings, and it does not use the fourth question of each record, a calendar check that says nothing about the event.
3.3The ledger
The two records belong to a set of eighty-four Skeptron cases that the parent study read on the same questions; twenty-four of them it read closely, these two among them. Skeptron's price windows are twenty-nine cases with no act, recording observed prices up to one closing price, with no decision and no actor, and this study reads them only as a group. They play no part here.
The ledger was made as follows. Each record was read twice, independently, by one model run twice, with the studio's recurring sentences set aside so that only the case's own words counted. Each reading answered fixed questions: whether the record shows an act by an authority, and of what kind; whether it presents the act as temporary or for a term; whether it names the condition, date or event of the act's end; what it says became of the act; whether it gives two different dated moments; whether it sets a figure announced apart from what was available; and whether it names who bore the cost while the act was in force. The questions and five hypotheses about their answers, F1 to F5, were registered on 6 October 2026, before any case was read for them. Where the two codings chose the same value the cell counts as settled; where they differ it is unsettled. Each hypothesis is reported on a strict reading, which counts unsettled cells as unclear, and a lenient one.
The hypothesis nearest to this study's question is F5: that in most cases that show an act, the case's own text does not name who bore the loss or the cost while the act was in force or not yet taken. The ledger has no question about blame. It asks who bore a cost, not who was accused, and the two are different things: the preamble of 301 accuses one party and names another as harmed. The study therefore reads the texts first and uses the ledger only as a check on what the records pass on to a reader of the modern summaries. In the case chapters its results are given in a sentence of plain words; the figures are gathered in the Appendix to the Conclusion, as they stand in the parent study's tables.