Unknown to many people in related fields, the business of factoring has enjoyed a remarkable increase in extent and importance during the past decade. The origins of this specialized business service are lost, like those of many other modern institutions, in the Middle Ages. Then, as today, factors served manufacturers and traders by selling goods on consignment in return for a commission; but in recent years they have turned increasingly to the financing of sales by advances on merchandise and the purchase of receivables. In fact, they have taken over a substantial share of the business which commercial bankers used, often reluctantly, to handle for small manufacturing concerns.

With the relations between management and labor being discussed on every hand today, the following notice is of topical interest. It reproduces the contents of a printed communication, now in the Society's collection, which was addressed to the employees of the Boston and Worcester Railroad shortly after the panic of 1857. The metaphor becomes somewhat confused as business changes from a ship in the first paragraph to a machine with wheels in the second, but the tone and logic of the appeal are attractive.

Until recently, students of the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries concentrated on technological changes or on labor and social problems but neglected capital and the capitalist. Mantoux gave 160 pages to technology, 100 to labor, and only 34 to capital. Mrs. Knowles devoted 8½ pages out of 392 to capital, companies, and combinations. The Hammonds have given us volumes on the town laborer, the skilled laborer, and the village laborer, but we still lack the book Unwin once hoped they would write on the working life and ideals of the entrepreneur.

All things considered George Smith and J. Young Scammon were the two outstanding bankers in Chicago history from 1836, when the city's first bank (a branch of the State Bank) was opened, to the turn of the century. Both men became actively identified with the life of the pioneer community in their twenties. One was a Scottish banker of extraordinary ability, the other was a public-spirited lawyer with strong leanings toward banking throughout his life. One saw in legal restraints on banking only unfortunate restrictions to a successful banker, the other strove for laws to prescribe bank practice.

The advertisement which is reproduced on the opposite page is an interesting recent acquisition for which the Society has to thank Mr. Lee M. Friedman of Boston. Written by a shoe merchant who was, to say the least, rather eccentric, the advertisement is amusing and almost incomprehensible. Yet it reflects the strong personal flavor which was characteristic of newspaper advertising until long after 1849, while in its use of a headline and illustration and in its general arrangement, the copy represents a distinct technical advance over the prevailing copy of the period.

In sending copies of Dr. Henrietta M. Larson's Jay Cooke—Private Banker to its members, the Business Historical Society has taken a definite step forward. For the first time in its eleven years' existence, the Society has, with this presentation, been instrumental in distributing a significant historical volume prepared by a trained business historian and dealing with the business career of an important business man.

Detroit is the oldest center of civilization in the vast area of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley. Mission and trading posts there were at Chequamegon, Green Bay, Michilimackinac, Chicago, and possibly elsewhere, but all save Detroit were destroyed either temporarily or permanently. The missions at Chequamegon and Chicago were abandoned soon after their establishment, and except for the presence of a few independent traders, the modern settlement of these places dates from the nineteenth century. Michilimackinac, settled earlier than Detroit, still remains a center of civilization; but there have been several removals of the settlement as originally founded, and the present one on the Island dates only from 1780, while the place has steadily dwindled in relative importance from the commercial center of a wide region to a mere summer resort.

If a man's ability is to be rated according to the amount of money he makes, Cyrus H. McCormick was one of America's ablest business leaders in the nineteenth century. A more discriminating view of his career would necessitate some important qualifications in such an estimate. McCormick's personal achievements—both as inventor and as a business man—were truly remarkable in the period before about 1860, and during the whole course of his life he demonstrated rare talents and performed prodigious deeds. But in his later years he made serious errors in judgment, failed to adopt well-rounded policies, and pursued business methods which were fundamentally poor. While his managerial successes and financial profits were very notable, his record as a whole does not reflect the sober and well-balanced judgment which is essential to the first-class business mind.

In connection with the above review of the life of Cyrus Hall McCormick it is appropriate to say something about the McCormick Historical Association. This organization has purposes which relate closely to the objects of the Business Historical Society, and the materials which it has gathered together constitute an important source of business history which should be known to all students of the subject. The McCormick Historical Association has been building up an intensive collection of printed manuscript and museum materials at the McCormick Library, 679 Rush Street, Chicago. The items relate to a rather wide range of topics but they center in the activities and interests of Cyrus Hall McCormick and the McCormick family.

A sheaf of old letters on deposit in the Baker Library of Harvard University gives a glimpse of an early type of locomotive which in a real sense epitomizes the pioneer stage of both American locomotive engineering and American business.

The Society has prepared an exhibit of historical material in connection with the Tercentenary Celebration of Harvard University. Taking his cue from the year of Harvard's founding, the Executive Secretary has arranged documents and pictures to illustrate briefly the chief developments in American business during the past three hundred years. Business records collected by the Society (with some supplementary material from the Baker Library collections) have been placed in four groups, focusing upon the years 1636, 1736, 1836, and 1886. A brief description of the outstanding business features of the period accompanies each group of documents. These descriptive statements give a perspective upon business which is illuminating to many people, and they are reproduced here for the benefit of those who cannot see the exhibit itself.

The combination of some 200 small railroads in New England into the present few systems has involved so many interesting episodes that to describe them all would take a very long time. I shall limit myself therefore to describing a few typical series of events which led to consolidations in New England. The first two episodes deal with the incorporation of branch lines within the larger systems of from 60 to 80 years ago; the third episode deals with the attempted and in part successful building up of a through line from Boston to New York and to the Hudson River above New York.