Neither cash sale nor barter were adequate means for bringing a growing number of high-priced durable goods to the American consumer. The employment of installment credit facilitated the growth of a mass market for such products and provides an example of the utilization of an old commercial technique for a new purpose.

This account of the activities of an energetic, highly diversified mercantile capitalist illustrates in some detail the world-wide flow of commodities and capital in the early nineteenth century. Aggressive merchandising and sophisticated administration were involved, and one by-product was a rich reservoir of investment capital for developing American industries.

Although the Vatican Film Library at Saint Louis University has been described recently in such diverse publications as the London Times, Osservatore Romano, Time, The American Historical Review, the Saturday Review and the National Geographic, it has never been explored fully by the scholarly world. The object of this article is to describe the extent of the microfilm collection at Saint Louis University, to provide some guides to the use of the manuscripts, and to indicate some possible areas of fruitful research in business and economic history.

Teapot Dome has long stood in the public mind as a conspicuous symbol not only of political corruption but of degenerate business morality as well. An examination of the charges against Albert B. Fall, therefore, though necessarily concerned with political and personal rather than business data, touches the interest of students of business history, whose natural concern lies in identifying the factual basis for incidents which have become part of the folklore of American business.

Public accounting practice and the nature of the accounting profession itself has, in the years under consideration, been shaped by a series of external forces. The Great Depression stimulated codification and regulation of practice. Further refinements of auditing procedures were introduced in the wake of the McKesson & Robbins case. The basic question of who was authorized to practice received almost continuous attention, and was the subject of much legislation and some important legal action. World War II introduced new practices, added responsibilities, and certain difficulties. And finally, the emergence of a strong national organization provided the profession with a means for achieving internal consistency and the capacity for co-ordinated reaction to rapid external change.

This timely account of the hunching of the Suez Canal project reveals both sides of the coin of innovation. It is, on the one hand, a study of the character and methods of one of the most famous innovators of the nineteenth century. Ferdinand DeLesseps was not a politician, a financier, an engineer, a promoter (in the common sense of the word), or a businessman. Yet he succeeded brilliantly in a venture requiring consummate mastery of all these professional fields. On the other hand is revealed the waterway itself — vital to one civilization, useless and neglected in another, and then of transcendent importance as world history marched on. Realization of the grand scheme envisaged by the Pharaohs came at last when economic and political factors momentarily aligned in a pattern of opportunity for a unique set of entrepreneurial qualifications.

In the early days of the Republic, opposition to a national bank derived from fear, ignorance, and a basic cleavage of prophecy. To many persons banks were synonymous with speculation; others viewed them as “aristocratic engines” designed to advance the interests of the few over those of the many. Most important, however, was the discrepancy of viewpoints between those who envisaged an agricultural nation and those who already sensed the embryonic stirrings of a vast industrial economy. To the htter, a strong central bank seemed indispensable. The struggle to establish the First Bank of the United States emphasized the rural-urban cleavage that was to influence much nineteenth-century history. It was also a conspicuous early recourse to implied Constitutional powers, anathema to States' Rights defenders and a great hope of businessmen in a still feeble nation.