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.

Business historians have been used in actual business and may have a future in large concerns where costly mistakes are repeated partly because the turnover of officials is great and constant. Experience in business is accumulated in large volume—and forgotten.

The growth and development of modern private business enterprise has been accompanied with a slowly maturing realization of the value and importance of both current and historical records. The ever-increasing accumulation of records and, in most instances, the entirely inadequate methods of retention, preservation, and storage have drawn attention to the growing need for the establishment of a methodical retention procedure. Such a costly solution as a program for new construction offers a sad commentary on management; the question of available space resolves itself into a problem of management.

The records of the Industrial Commission of 1898 and 1899 present an unusual cross section of the opinions of the men who were building, supplying, and managing America. Manufacturers, shippers, trade-association officers, government representatives, union leaders, labor and corporation lawyers, workers, and executives all gave extensive testimony before sections of the Commission. Often these men read into the record long statements of their general philosophy and specific beliefs, views which, considering their source, seem at least as important as the widely read utterances of novelists, preachers, professors, and journalists. Yet these opinions of men of action now lie buried in the forbidding format of government documents. Using such material the scholar may write a new history of American thought and development based on the evidence of the men who were doing the job rather than on that of the more literary bystanders. This brief article will discuss some of the social and business attitudes of railroad administration as revealed by the executives' own testimony before the Industrial Commission.

The above papers, purposely planned to stay close to concrete instance, in business history and to represent varying points of view, were intended to serve as taking-off points for further discussion. In lieu of that discussion, and without attempting to bring the papers to any definite conclusion, I am focusing what I have to say under five general headings. This is not to bring forth any deep philosophical questions, nor merely to repeat elementary principles of historical study; it is rather to suggest some questions or approaches drawn from the study of business history and stated or implied in the above papers that may be helpful in considering business as a part of the larger history of society.

My approach to this question is based upon a conviction that every socially useful human being must be aware of his debt to generations past and present and therefore he must be filled with a constant sense of his obligation. To cast the business administrator then in the role of benefactor, when, from my point of view, to him more than to the member of any other one class of human society should be assigned the place of the beneficiary, is to put the emphasis upon the wrong thing. Obviously it is true that, in so far as the business administrator is part of the whole body of human society, he may be said to be part of the total creditor group as well as of the debtor. The problem becomes, then, one of relatives. Has he taken more than he has given ? I believe he has—not in every individual instance at all times, but as a general rule.

Let us not think that business men constitute the only class that evokes severe social questions. At different times the clergy, the warriors, the politicians, and the scholars have caused others to sit in judgment on their status and usefulness. Indeed, since these classes have come into existence as specialized contributors to civilization, there has been a swing to or away from one or another. The history of civilization is the history of their rise, mastery, and decline; their hard work and their sloth; their leadership and their loss of dynamic qualities. Indeed, one of the advantages of our evolutionary process is our chance to swing from one group to another for leadership or even control, according to whichever promises best results in action. Of course, this does not mean that the classes in question disappear or that they are not mutually dependent; it means simply that there is a constant shift in leadership, each class always contributing something whether in declining or increasing amount.

The above was the subject of a joint session of the American Historical Association and the Business Historical Society which was to have been held at Columbus, Ohio, on the morning of December 30, 1942. Mr. John W. Higgins was to have presided at this meeting, an especially fitting arrangement because he is a business administrator as well as president of the Society. Several ten-minute addresses were planned to present different issues and varying points of view. Following these, the subject was to have been opened for discussion from the floor, to be continued at a luncheon session.

When I was asked to speak about the relation of the business man to public affairs, it occurred to me that the subject should be touched upon at some central part of American history. In the shaping of our institutions, no period is more important than the years 1775 to 1797. And few will discount the contributions which were then made by Washington. The stamp of his influence appears at every significant point.

Imagine for a moment that the present war should prove to be the Armageddon of our civilization. What would the Utopian Historical Society, meeting a thousand years hence, consider the chief contributions of our era, which has lasted now for nearly three milleniums? The Greeks, it would probably be decided, arrived at a perfection in sculpturing never before equaled, nor since surpassed. The Italians were consummate painters, German composers were greater than those of any other nation. The English were able to boast two, perhaps three or four, of the greatest poets the world had ever known. Americans developed the art of business administration to such a degree that it was viewed with wonder by the rest of the world.

One of the precious nursery tales of business tells of a poor boy who became Lord Mayor of London Town.

The number of historians who have touched upon the Morrill Tariff in 1861 is equaled only by the variety of ways in which they have interpreted it. Such a complex subject obviously cannot be treated definitively in the two documents that are presented in this note. On the other hand, it does seem reasonable that these two documents may prove of interest to every student of tariff history and hold a warning for all historians: that the simplified interpretation of our economic development in terms of sections or large economic groups frequently is not borne out by factual evidence. Indeed, most careful historians will agree that it is impossible to dismiss a major tariff law with a generalization like “this section was for it, and that section was against it.”

A small bundle of miscellaneous bits of old business material has recently come to the Baker Library through the courtesy of Dr. Frank S. Churchill of Bass River, Massachusetts.

The readers of the Bulletin are already acquainted with the Genoese cartularia, the bulky volumes in which mediaeval notaries of Genoa copied their notarial instruments. Those notarial records are a mirror of life in mediaeval Genoa. Notaries were called upon to record international treaties, state decrees, and local regulations; they recorded business transactions, which were all made in a notary's presence, ranging from large transactions involving considerable sums of money to small ones of a few pence; and, besides, notaries wrote out and copied in their books promises, agreements, or contracts of a most intimate and personal kind.