The memoir of William Cripps covers two periods of business activity. The first dated from 1819, when he sailed to New York to begin his career as an agent for the export of Nottingham lace, and ended with his first retirement in 1845. The second began in 1859, when through the roguery of a business associate he found himself a ruined man and, with the aid of the many friends of his youth in New York and Boston, he was successful in founding the Standard Fire Insurance Company of which he remained president until his second retirement in 1879. He then returned to England and in 1882 wrote the memoir here published.

“English accounting practice has been developing for many years, but it has not made any substantial contribution to economic science over its own field of the analysis of the results of industry, although it has practically a monopoly grip of the required data. Accountants have the figures; other people cannot use them and if accountants will not, then we get nothing; economics continues its abstract declarations and business blunders on by individual instinct.” This ringing challenge delivered by the late Lord Stamp more than twenty-five years ago has not been fully met by either the English or the American accounting profession. An assessment of progress to date and an analysis of the factors impeding accounting research are the purposes of this paper.

Though their roots reach back for centuries, both public relations and the corporation annual report have reached semi-maturity only during the present century. Business public relations began with the reaction of the first customer to the goods, services, and personality of the first man who offered some commodity—the ham of a squirrel, a live coal, a stone spear—for sale or barter. Everyone has business public relations of some sort, and even those modern companies which still disdain any formal public relations cannot escape the fact that daily they produce some sort of relations reaction in dealing with their segment of the public. As for corporation annual reports, they go back to the time the first corporation totaled its receipts and expenditures at the end of the first year and told its stockholders that they had lost or made so much money. From those beginnings have developed a public relations field that is today a professional science, albeit somewhat ambiguous, and corporation annual reports that rival the sleek magazines in budget requirements, circulation, attention-getting features, and the worry and labor of the staff which prepares them.

Editor's Note: This memorandum of a manager of a Hearst hacienda in Mexico from 1922 to 1931 records an episode in the re-distribution of lands during the revolution which began in 1910. This memorandum, set down soon after the events which it records, is indicative of the methods used by revolutionary governments and officials in fulfilling their promise of land to their agrarian followers. It also illustrates the resulting confusion to business managers and the insecurity of property, especially foreign-owned. By such methods a great deal of foreign management and capital was driven out of Mexico.

When I agreed to recount the story of the Business Historical Society, I naturally thought it was my own swan song that was expected. The occasion was presented to me as the probable closing of a period in the history of the Society and the opening of another day. On thinking over the events of the last twenty-five years, however, I have discovered a number of facts of larger issue and have had a chance to peer beneath the curtain of changing circumstances of world-wide import. The Business Historical Society is not just one more of those numerous American organizations that display our national weakness. It was set up under circumstances of high import by men who were feeling their way toward something significant which they but vaguely understood. In this story, therefore, are revealed some of the social processes which are the fabric of our history. There is, indeed, very little of the merely antiquarian in the theme with which we have to deal—the first survey of the Business Historical Society's experiences.

In New England, as nowhere else in the country, petty capitalism is showing its great abiding strength. The region's large industrial establishments may close their doors and move to other parts of the country, but its small firms stand ready to take over where the larger ones have given way. Today, New England is dotted with manufacturing plants that were once the property of great industrial enterprises but that are now the honeycombed homes of countless small shops and foundries.

On December 28, 1948, the oldest of the three American watch manufacturers, the Waltham Watch Company, filed an application for reorganization in the Federal District Court of Boston, Massachusetts. For some time it had been common knowledge, both in the trade and among the more informed public, that the company was in serious financial straits. The action of December 28 made the difficulties and future of this old New England firm no longer a regional issue but a pressing national one. Officials of the firm, representatives of labor, of the press, of radio, and politicians, both State and Federal, offered explanations and suggested answers to the timely question: What caused the company's bankruptcy and how could Waltham be saved? In attempting to find answers to this question, the representatives of management, labor, and government indicated a new direction and a new development in American business.

Materials in Baker Library at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration for the study of labor relations have been recently increased by the gift of an unusually complete and well-organized collection from Thompson Products, Inc., of Cleveland. The equivalent of fifty thousand pages of documents, arranged chronologically and indexed, illustrating labor-management-government relations during the eventful years 1933 to 1948, are a welcome addition in themselves. But the fact that they illustrate the labor history of a company which has been in the forefront of the conflict over governmental interference in labor matters makes them of even greater interest to the student. In fact, had the company not been so labor-minded, the collection itself would probably not have existed.

In September the members of the Society received copies of a new number in the Harvard Studies in Business History: The House of Baring in American Trade and Finance: English Merchant Bankers at Work, 1763-1861, by Ralph W. Hidy. This work, the first history of any Anglo-American merchant banker to be written from the records of the firm itself, traces the progress of Baring Brothers & Company during the first hundred years of its existence.

Jamsetji Tata was once a merchant, like his father, but unlike his father he became a great industrialist. Instead of specializing in one huge concern, he spread out to establish many companies of high quality and strategic importance—the foundation of modern Industrial India. It was in part owing to his work that India was able recently to wage a war on the side of the Allies without much help from Britain.