Business history presents so many problems and opportunities that I hardly know which ones to discuss in the time available or where to start. Perhaps it is well to begin by reminding ourselves just what business history is, for there is a great deal of misunderstanding on this point. I refuse to attempt a precise definition because it seems to be impossible to obtain a satisfactory definition of the term “business” itself, but I think that I can give a fairly clear idea of the scope of the field.

A familiar figure in ancient Greek and Latin literature is the traveling merchant. Sometimes we find him in his work, usually having some adventure, even exploring new lands. Plautus, who lived in 254-184 B. C. and used Greek themes and contemporary figures in his comedies, made such a merchant the hero of his play, Mercator. The play deals with a young Athenian traveling merchant by the name of Charinus.

“Pieces of eight, pieces of eight!” screamed Captain Flint's parrot in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Yet, how many of us, who as youngsters dreamed over that tale of adventure, realized that the bird spoke the correct name for what our American and English forefathers called the Spanish dollar?

The striking problem faced by the labor administrator in the early Connecticut button industry was the shortage of native skilled artisans. While unskilled laborers, bookkeepers, and even managers could be drawn from sources in this country, highly skilled artisans were usually available only in England. The shortage of skilled labor thus truly constituted the bottleneck to quality production. In the correspondence of Alexander Hamilton, for the year 1791, there is a letter from one John Mix, pewter buttonmaker of New Haven, reporting that he was going to produce diverse kinds of buttons. This was possible “because we have a person lately from Europe who has the skill perfectly who is a gentleman who is able and has engaged to instruct and teach us everything necessary in the making of them.”

The Business Historical Society has just published a revised edition of the pamphlet, The Preservation of Business Records, by Ralph M. Hower, assistant professor of Business History at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration and clerk of the Business Historical Society.

The General Foods Corporation has recently issued a brochure entitled A Calendar of Walter Baker & Company, Inc., and its Times, 1765-1940. As the name implies, the Calendar consists of quotations from contemporary sources and statements of facts arranged by years and sometimes under specific dates.

The Business Historical Society is happy to note the organization of the Business History Society of Indiana. The home of the Society will be at Indiana University; the Library of the University will be the official depository for the materials collected, and the departments of Economics and History stand pledged to aid the enterprise.

Some years ago the Minnesota Historical Society received from Miss Vera Cole a collection of volumes and papers which had been the property of her father, a Minneapolis business man.

Probably most Americans who read Dumas' immortal Three Musketeers and its sequels have no clear idea of the coins in question when the great novelist writes of pistoles and louis d'or. And though the louis d'or was coined for only about a century and a half, it has left, thanks to a fortunate combination of circumstances, a lasting mark in history.

Joseph Hertzog was born at a time when the spirit of romanticism was displacing the cold, calculating aura of the eighteenth century; when Schiller and Goethe, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Poe and Whittier, impelled by their love for the homelier things of life, wrote eloquently to the heart of man; when the Ohio yielded place to the Mississippi as a western boundary; when the pioneers were pushing the frontiers farther and farther westward and giving our country that dauntless courage, that sturdy honesty, and that democratic spirit which we should like to consider synonymous with “Americanism” today. With his poetic soul, clear vision, and faith in his country, Hertzog contributed to the progress that marked his epoch and gave to posterity an example of sterling qualities that never wavered in the face of disappointment, ill treatment, and even failure to realize the ambitions he hoped to reach.

The establishment of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris in 1799, following a conception for a museum of science and industry outlined by Descartes a century and a half earlier, was the beginning of a type of institution which has great significance to business history. Many industrial museums have since been established. Some have grown to vast exhibitions of industrial machines and processes, such as the Science Museum in London, the Deutsches Museum in Munich, the Technical Museum in Vienna, and the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. In America and in Europe many smaller museums have also been established to illustrate some particular aspects of industrial development. Among the outstanding ones in America are the Edison Museum, established by Henry Ford in Dearborn, Michigan, the Industrial Museum of the American Steel and Wire Co. at Worcester, Massachusetts, and the John Woodman Higgins Armory, of the Worcester Pressed Steel Co.

With old age we associate feebleness, an antiquated point of view, and general decay. None of these is found in the department store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which is the object of our interest.

Those of us today who associate the title of “notary public” only with the man or woman who affixes a seal to our income-tax declaration, after we have sworn to its accuracy and signed it, are surprised to learn what an important role the public notary played in the early days of business. For a view of that other notary let us turn back to Italy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Then practically every kind of business contract, except buying and selling for cash, was drawn up by a public notary in the presence of witnesses, thus becoming a matter of public record. Partnership agreements, investments in business by non-partners, loans of goods and money, credit sales, banking operations, bills of exchange, leases for shops and houses, contracts of labor and apprenticeship— all were recorded in the register of an official notary. Each city collected the cartularies of its notaries at their death and preserved them carefully.