At the end of the selections from Mellon's autobiography published in the December issue of the Bulletin, the author, having put his new banking house in order, was off on a trip to New Orleans. The present Bulletin carries his narrative forward from the time of his return until 1884, when his autobiography ends.

The general thread of interest which runs through the story of business experience from 1872 to 1884 is that of panic, liquidation, and recovery. The author gives an unusually good account of what happened during the panic, and he also tries to explain the coming of the panic of 1873 and the severe liquidation which followed.

There has recently come to the editor's desk a copy of a booklet entitled Historical Societies in the United States and Canada: a Handbook. This booklet lists 1,467 historical organizations in the two countries, most of which are small local societies. For each of some 900 of these, the booklet gives the officers, the number of members, the annual income, a brief statement of the contents of the society's library or museum, and its publications.

There is in the city of Danzig on the Baltic Sea a medieval painting which is of unusual interest in the history of business. It is an altarpiece, the “Last Judgment” by Hans Memling, the inimitable fifteenth-century artist of the Low Countries. Besides being a great work of art, this picture is in a sense an important business record. It is, moreover, in a real way a product of business; its origin was intimately tied in with international mercantile activity in the fifteenth century. War prevented the “Last Judgment” from occupying the place for which it was intended, and wars have continued to give it an insecure existence. The present conflict in Europe may result in another removal, possibly back to Bruges, the place of the activity of those medieval business men whom it is said to commemorate.

The above was the subject of a session at the annual meeting of the American Economic History Association held in Princeton, New Jersey, late in September of the present year. The main paper was presented by Dr. Stanley Pargellis of the Newberry Library in Chicago. The discussion was led by Mr. Ralph Budd, president of the Burlington Lines, by Professor Colston Warne of Amherst College, and Professor Kent Healy of Yale University. Lively discussion followed from the floor.

Why are some men notably successful in business? In the case of one of the most outstanding American business families we have the story of the beginnings of the family's success as told in the autobiography of its founder. That story is a significant one.

Business men have been notable collectors. Perhaps more than any other group, they have been able to exercise the universal acquisitive propensity of mankind. They have had both the financial means to buy the objects they wanted and the contacts that made it practicable to collect.

It is with regret that the Bulletin notes the recent closing of the Industrial Museum of the American Steel and Wire Company at Worcester, Massachusetts.

The current importance of labor administration in business highlights the need for a better understanding of the historical background of the relations of business and labor. No part of American history has been more inadequately handled. Three aspects of the history of labor have been emphasized above everything else: labor organization, the conflict of labor and employer, and “exploitation” of labor by business. This approach has tended to engender conflict rather than to promote understanding.

Perhaps the most significant thing about the business man in folklore is that he is far from an important figure in it. From this we may deduce that among those people who have created what we call folklore the business man has either not played an important rôle or his function and contribution have not been understood. He is not, however, altogether missing; we might not recognize him, since he is a remote and shadowy figure compared with the business man as we think of him today. But he is there, and the very form and circumstances in which he appears have meaning.

The New York Metropolitan area contains a greater volume of important business records than any similar section of the United States; yet up to some three years ago little had been done by the historical profession to encourage the preservation of the records for scholarly use. Some New York business records have been deposited from time to time in the local university libraries, the New York Historical Society, the Museum of the City of New York, and the Public Library, where the former Director, H. M. Lydenberg, made occasional efforts in this direction. Through members of the Business Historical Society, and others, the attention of the Baker Library had sometimes been directed to New York records; but all of these efforts together have barely ruffled the surface of the vast mass of papers reposing in vaults, private libraries, and storage warehouses.

In the days of the gilds, when a master craftsman hired half a dozen journeymen to work for him and became the capitalist of his time, one of his chief assets was skill at his trade. The industrial revolution left this petty capitalist as helpless as a museum piece so far as ownership of the tools of production was concerned, but it could not relegate to the showcase his outstanding characteristic, innate manual skill. The later age translated skill into mechanical ingenuity. Machines might turn out the finished product with an unskilled machine operator at their side, but back of the machines were mechanics with machine-wise fingers, and finally mechanical engineers with a creative sense. By means of the same ability which turned the old-time craftsmen into proprietors of production, the skilled mechanics of yesterday have evolved into industrial capitalists.