In July, 1936, the Burlington inaugurated a policy of making its historical records available to qualified scholars by depositing, in the Baker Library at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, all the records that could be found (some six tons in bulk) pertaining to the sale and colonization of its land grants in Iowa and Nebraska; a few years later similar material for the Hannibal & St. Joseph was added to this collection, thereby making it the most complete of its kind in the United States.

If the whole history of American experience in establishing and operating manufacturing ventures were recorded, the number of failures would probably be found to be prodigious. Countless communities on rivers, large and small, dreamed of the time when the hum and whir of machines would bring them wealth, and many such communities actually set up factories.

A book has recently appeared which is evidently the first volume of The Growth of Business Series to be published by the Columbia University Press.

The attention of the readers of the Bulletin was in the April issue directed to an address by Dr. Stanley Pargellis on the subject. “The Judgment of History on American Business.” The address, which was published by the Newcomen Society, American Branch, and also by the Railway Age and The Nation's Business, has evoked much stimulating discussion. A letter is printed below that comments on Dr. Pargelhs' address and carries the discussion further. It emphasizes a fundamental aspect of the problem, and in effect it challenges the scholar to an examination of his own thinking about business. The BULLETIN presents the letter as the statement of a business man who has thought much about the problem.

Before the next number of the Bulletin is issued, members of the Society will receive a copy of the latest volume in the Harvard Studies in Business History. The book is entitled the Development of Two Bank Groups in the Central Northwest: a Study in Bank Policy and Organization.

Various religions have been critical of the business man or even hostile to him. Christian writers have crudely called him the “rich man.” The Old Testament set the fashion, but not with a single voice. The New Testament is more emphatic, even if not uniformly opposed to enterprise, efficiency, and success.

The National Archives has in its custody an unexploited group of records that constitutes one of the best collections in existence bearing upon the brilliant period of our nation's maritime history from 1792 to 1801. This material is found in the papers of the United States Court of Claims and relates to those cases commonly known as French Spoliation Claims.

Over a century ago Henry Shaw climbed the business ladder in St. Louis, and in his later years he did much for the culture of his adopted city. Shaw left behind many records of his career. Those pertaining to his business have been deposited in the Baker Library at Harvard University. The records are voluminous and as yet unused, except in so far as they have been examined for the purpose of the following tentative statement. The collection includes personal accounts, real estate records, family correspondence, and business records, such as waste books, journals, ledgers, invoice books, and bank balances. The collection of letters is particularly significant and valuable, for it deals with many subjects, including importing and exporting, and covers the whole period of Shaw's activity in America.

John Coggan, the first merchant of Boston of whom there is any record, began business in 1634. He thus was presumably well established as a retailer by the time Robert Keayne entered the same type of business a year or two later. Unlike his fellow merchant, who was in 1639 fined heavily by the general court for charging too high a mark-up on certain imported goods, Coggan seems to have abided by Boston's principles of just price, which allowed the retailer to sell at 4 pence on the shilling above the cash cost in England.

The Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures, the oldest industrial corporation in the United States, is now in process of liquidation.

Some time ago an interesting manuscript volume was brought to the office of the Society for examination, by Frank G. Neal, Jr., of Wells, Maine. It was the account book of a Joseph Gatchell of that place, chiefly for the years 1797 to 1808 with occasional entries through 1816.

A subject in the history of business that is waiting to be studied is the development of ideas on how business should be conducted and, secondary to that, how business men should be trained. Training in tool subjects—writing, bookkeeping, etc.—is almost as old as business, and commercial geography and law have long been considered proper subjects for the aspiring young merchant's clerk to study. As for the science of business, that field has been left almost entirely to the economic theorist, with the result that it has not in reality been a “science of business” at all.