The public utilities furnish numerous and outstanding examples of government regulation and later government control if we follow the distinction between these which Professor Gras has indicated. Aside from water, the oldest of our utilities are those furnishing artificial gas, beginning in Baltimore in 1816. The early franchises or charters granted to these utilities represent, according to Professor Gras' definition, extreme forms of government regulation, because these franchises or charters actually fixed rates and prescribed the character of service to be rendered for very long periods of time, say for fifty years or double that length of time. In the case of our earliest railroad charters, granted beginning about the middle 1820's, the power to make rates was often granted to the Boards of Directors of the companies. Some States, while permitting the rates to be made by the railroads themselves, did make reservation of such power to the State if need arose for exercising it.

When we read about “government control” in recent years and then reflect upon the old term “government regulation,” we wonder whether a change has occurred. We ask our friends and find that they feel that there is a difference between the old regulation and the new control, but they hesitate to state what the difference is. Then we sit down to wrestle with the problem. The exercise is not easy. Perhaps the historical approach will be helpful.

The nation is just emerging from a state of wartime economic mobilization involving a degree of regimentation of its business life without precedent in this country and hardly surpassed by the most dictatorial régimes abroad. At the peak of the war effort a typical manufacturer was largely directed by the government as to what he might make, what raw materials he might use, to which customers he might sell, in what order, and at what price. He could not enlarge or substantially alter his plant without governmental authority. He was limited in both directions as to the wages he might pay. While not subject to direct coercive control in the selection of manpower, he could generally not hire workers beyond a semi-compulsory employment “ceiling,” and his manpower pool was radically limited by the demands of selective service and of competing war activities. His most important trade journal had become the Federal Register. While his discretion was not completely circumscribed, he moved within a framework so confined as to be tolerable only when the national existence was at stake.

On Monday, April 13, 1840, one William Bement moved to his farm at Northumberland, west of the Hudson River and north of Albany, New York. On that same day he started a diary in which he not only meticulously recorded the conventional observations about the weather but also set down details of his activities as a farmer and considerable information about the financial side of his farming. The diary ends abruptly on Sunday, February 20, 1842, apparently because Bement's career as a farmer was then coming to a close.

The lessons of the San Francisco earthquake and fire are constantly before any person interested in the preservation of the records of early business. So many of the actual facts will never be known because of the wholesale destruction of all the books of record of so many of the leading businesses dating back to the earliest days of commercial activity in California. For the business historian the extent of this catastrophe is far greater than the loss of the stories of individual businesses in San Francisco, insomuch as San Francisco was the financial center of not only California but Alaska, Nevada and, to a lesser degree, the Pacific Northwest. In order to tell the complete story of western business, the business historian must improvise and synthesize scattered records to get a connected account.

Freeman Hunt, the founder of the first general business magazine published in the United States — known today as the Commercial and Financial Chronicle — was also responsible for the publication of the first series of biographies of American business men. Biographies of mercantile capitalists and a few industrial capitalists were a regular feature of his Merchant's Magazine and Commercial Review from its beginning in 1839, and in 1855 and 1857 appeared the Lives of American Merchants edited and published by Hunt.

The Bulletin received in December an announcement of the hundredth anniversary of the Graniteville Company.

Two major universities in the United States have recently added to their curriculum work in business history.

For a little over three-fourths of a century thousands of men in the United States have toiled to establish and develop the petroleum industry. Starting along Oil Creek in 1859, they moved up and down the Allegheny River, into West Virginia, and thence across the continent, opening up new sources of supply in Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, California, and other States. Through their initiative, persistence, courage, resourcefulness, and vision, they created a new and magnificent industry — one typically American.

In 1855 the German journalist, novelist, and historian, Gustav Freytag, gave to the world his popular novel Soll und Haben (Debit and Credit). The scene of the story is Eastern Germany, where Germans, Poles, and Jews lived in conflict about the year 1848.

What kind of a people were the Americans who so energetically drove forward American business expansion in the nineteenth century? We find something of an answer in little vignettes scattered through a book of observations on travel in the United States in the early 1830's, which has become a classic description of American life and people. Its author, Alexis de Tocqueville, was not particularly concerned with business; he was interested chiefly in the American experiment in democracy. Yet his observations are extremely suggestive. He gives a glimpse of the general esprit of the American, of his motives or objectives, of his restlessness and his energy, of the generally fluid state of American society, and of the vastness of American opportunity. De Tocqueville's observations are not objective descriptions; they are the impressions and interpretations of a philosophical observer and student of society who was familiar with England as well as Western Europe. From the perspective of today, they appear remarkably keen; indeed they were in large measure prophetic of what came to pass. In speaking of the American people he says that “boldness of enterprise is the foremost cause of its rapid progress, its strength, and it greatness.”

The village shoemaker has become merely a tradition. His little shop, if it remains standing, has been put to other uses, and his cobbler's bench, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, has found its way into present-day living-rooms in the guise of a coffee table or smoking stand. Of the product of his skill, little remains because, unlike the cabinet maker and metal worker, he worked in goods that served their purpose and were gone, but he was as true a craftsman as they, and perhaps a more important figure in the life of a town. From, him young and old obtained their footwear, and to him they brought it back to be mended. Farm horses and saddle horses wore the harnesses he made; ploughs and carriages alike depended on the strength and stitching of his traces. And, in return, he got from his fellow townsmen sometimes cash but more frequently the necessities of his family's existence. In his ledger, debits and credits reflected the whole business of give-and-take in the life of the community.

The Waltham history, edited by Professor N. S. B. Gras, is eleventh in the Harvard Studies in Business History series. It is a story which has required a deft and delicate touch in the recording, and the reader will early come to appreciate Dr. Moore's handling of complicated factual material, as well as to respect the conclusions he has pointed up. Dr. Moore's history of the Waltham Watch Company is a study of business policy—a detailed analysis of the business methods of the top men at Waltham. Were there such a thing as a “normal” American business, the chapters of its history would fall neatly and evenly into order—management, labor, plant and technological processes, finance, distribution, and external influences. Happy the historian to whose lot such a tidy assignment falls! It seems reasonably certain, however, that no recorder will ever face a perfect balance of the forces involved in producing and selling merchandise.