By the end of 1852, six months after the establishment in San Francisco of the principal office, Wells, Fargo & Company had spread its express and banking services well into California's gold-mining country. The most tangible evidence of the organization's growth was the rise in value of its gold shipments to New York. The first shipment, which left San Francisco on July 31 aboard the Pacific Mail Steamship Oregon, crossed the Isthmus of Panama, and was taken up the eastern coast of the continent aboard the United States Mail Steamship Ohio, amounted to only $21,717. The year's last shipment, almost tripling the first, was $61,615. The largest was sent on December 1 and amounted to $68,735. Total shipments by Wells, Fargo & Company for the five-month period between July 31 and the end of the year were $312,492. San Francisco's largest banking firm, Page, Bacon & Company, shipped during the same period $6,313,986, and Adams & Company, competitor of Wells, Fargo & Company in the express and banking business, $5,542,000.

There is an old but erroneous tradition in the Anglo-Saxon countries that banking began in the seventeenth century with the London goldsmiths. In fact, however, banking is much older, having been practised in mediaeval times extensively in Italy, the Low Countries and Spain. To be sure, mediaeval banking was different from early English and American, let alone modern, banking. Negotiable instruments did not then exist; and book transfers were used where in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries bank notes served in England and America and checks serve today.

Among the scholars who have thrown light on mediaeval banking and who have helped to explode the myth of banking as an Anglo-Saxon invention, Raymond de Roover, professor at Wells College, holds first rank. His book entitled Money, Banking and Credit in Mediaeval Bruges is the subject of this review.

We must begin with a survey of the types of business which have existed throughout the known ages. In no other way can we obtain a perspective for understanding the present and for anticipating the future. In no other way can we become accustomed to the idea and the fact of eternal change, which is the life of society as of nature.

That there ever was a pre-capitalistic stage may be doubted, though such a view has been maintained. If by capitalism we mean a system of getting a living through the use of capital goods, then only the ape man or the pithecanthropus erectus could have escaped it. Capital goods, such as tools and weapons, have been essential to known primitive tribes. The full-fledged man, using fire and possessing a sense of humor, probably lived tens of thousands of years in a primitive capitalism but without any business at all.

At the close of the Napoleonic era, the banking business of France except in one respect had not advanced much over what it had been in 1789. At that time it had been dominated by Protestant Swiss, the best known of whom was Necker. Some of them like the Mallets, Delesserts, and Thélussons, descended from French Huguenots who had fled to Geneva and other places and in a later generation returned to France as Swiss. The business of these bankers consisted in lending their own funds and those entrusted to their care to worthy applicants for loans, probably merchants as well as noblemen. They administered fortunes for their owners, which is especially true of the court bankers who were charged with the financial affairs of the king and his family. In addition, like all eighteenth-century bankers they had a flourishing business in bills of exchange, including the accepting of drafts of bankers and merchants in other cities and countries. Necker is said to have organized these bankers and their foreign correspondents so as to provide by a system of short-term drafts the funds for French participation in our Revolutionary War.

In the streaked shade of a scrub mesquite a vaquero pours boiling water into a can holding two spoonfuls of concentrated coffee, adds cream from a tin, spoons in sugar to suit, and miles away from the nearest house enjoys a cup of coffee. Chances are good that the coffee came in a jar marked “Borden's” and that the cream, condensed but fresh and pure though hours away from a refrigerator or a cool well, came in a can bearing a similar label; for radiating from its New York hub The Borden Company has pushed into American homes and American life until its products are known wherever food products are bought, sold, and used.

A book has recently been published in the field of medieval business which should be called to the attention of readers of the Bulletin. It is The Medici Bank: Its Organization, Management, Operations, and Decline, by Raymond de Roover. This hundred-page volume in large part appeared earlier in the form of articles in a learned journal, but it is now available to a wider circle of readers in attractive form and beautifully illustrated. This notice is especially addressed to businessmen, who presumably did not see the articles as they appeared in the Journal of Economic History.

Wells, Fargo & Company, established in 1852, had its roots in Harnden & Company, the first of all express carriers. In the year 1841, Vermont-born Henry Wells, whose name was to rank in prominence with that of William F. Harnden and Alvin Adams in the history of the express business, was serving as Harnden's agent in Albany, New York. Many years later he explained how he came to leave Harnden's employ and to become the moving force in the first of several new express enterprises:

“I was in his [William F. Harnden's] employ and recommended him to extend his express line from Albany to Buffalo, and as transportation was offered, to Chicago, [but] Mr. Harnden did not believe that the People were there and he declined. His words of declination were ‘If Mr. Wells chose to run an Express to the Rocky Mountains he might — He [Mr. Harnden] would not do it.’ ”

Dr. Paul H. Giddens, professor of history and political science at Allegheny College, has undertaken to write a history of the Standard Oil Company of Indiana. He has been granted a leave of absence from his teaching duties and is already at work in the records of the company at its home office in Chicago.

Changes in the role of the commercial drummer during the thirty years prior to the Civil War are suggested by comparison of reports received from a salesman in the 1850's with similar reports received from a salesman for the same firm in the 1830's. The trips and reports of the earlier salesman, who traveled for J. M. L. & W. H. Scovill, a Connecticut brass rolling and fabricating partnership, were described in the last issue of this Bulletin. The chief complaint of the salesman in the 1830's was that the merchants of any importance made regular trips to Philadelphia or New York. Such merchants preferred to make all their purchases at one time in order to save trouble and expense in transportation and they also bought most of their goods from established jobbers to whom they were known and who would extend credit.

The experience of the Newberry Library in handling a mass of business records may be of value to other libraries, as well as to scholars, in an important field which, notwithstanding a number of recent excellent books, is still one of the least worked in American history. The primary question which disturbs librarians is, of course, whether the provision of shelf space and the cost of cataloguing, or otherwise arranging for scholarly use, are justifiable for records as voluminous as these.