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.

This month the members of the Business Historical Society are receiving The Whitesmiths of Taunton, a History of Reed & Barton, 1824-1943, by George S. Gibb. This is the eighth volume in the Harvard Studies in Business History published at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration under the direction of Professor N. S. B. Gras. It is the first volume in the series to be devoted wholly to the history of a manufacturing concern.

Returning to Philadelphia after an unsuccessful trip to Louisiana in 1807 and 1808, Bollmann entered business again. When a character like Bollmann goes into business, he quite naturally turns promoter, and this Bollmann did in 1808. Foreign trade at the time being seriously interfered with by the struggle between England and France under Napoleon, Bollmann began with the promotion of domestic manufacture.

Eric Bollmann, a Hanoverian by birth who lived in this country from 1796 to 1814, is all but forgotten today. But about 150 years ago he was widely known on two continents. To be sure, this was not owing to his extensive business activities but to some daring coups during the years of the French Revolution. In 1792, when the Jacobins came into power in Paris, Bollmann spirited the Minister of War, Narbonne, out of France and shortly afterwards tried to liberate Lafayette, then held as a prisoner by the Austrians in the fortress of Olmutz. After this attempt had failed, Bollmann came to the United States and established himself as a business man in Philadelphia.

Among the close associates of Piero di Cosimo de' Medici and his illustrious son, Lorenzo de' Medici, no one was more trusted by both father and son than Francesco Sassetti, their business partner and general manager. Yet Sassetti is virtually unknown to English readers. Like the Medici, he belonged to a noble Florentine family whose wealth originated in trade and was later re-invested in landed property in the city of Florence and the surrounding country.

American novelists and writers have found the plantation-slave régime and the romantic aspects of planter life so intriguing that they perhaps unintentionally have led the reading public to accept these as the whole picture of southern life in the days of slavery. The business man seems foreign to such a traditional picture and his activities less picturesque than those of planter, slave, or poor white. Seemingly, only the heroic proportions of an Anthony Adverse or a Rhett Butler can lift the business theme to a plane where it can compete with the other actors in the drama of the traditional South.

Who was Croesus? How rich was he? And how did he acquire the treasure that has made his name live to this day as a measure of great wealth?

Too often the “why” of early chain store success has been glibly explained in terms of present-day conditions. The following abbreviated list is, I believe, typical of the factors advanced to explain the impressive position of the chain store in our distributive system:

1. Greater skill in management due to the greater opportunity for specialization.

2. Greater financial strength and power in buying.

3. The possibility of using certain advertising media which are not adapted to the needs of independent retailers.

4. The possibility, through large scale operation, of developing a prestige such as the average small merchant can rarely cultivate.

5. The ability through integration to eliminate selling and buying costs which are inevitable when manufacturers, jobbers, and retailers are separate entities.