This timely account of the hunching of the Suez Canal project reveals both sides of the coin of innovation. It is, on the one hand, a study of the character and methods of one of the most famous innovators of the nineteenth century. Ferdinand DeLesseps was not a politician, a financier, an engineer, a promoter (in the common sense of the word), or a businessman. Yet he succeeded brilliantly in a venture requiring consummate mastery of all these professional fields. On the other hand is revealed the waterway itself — vital to one civilization, useless and neglected in another, and then of transcendent importance as world history marched on. Realization of the grand scheme envisaged by the Pharaohs came at last when economic and political factors momentarily aligned in a pattern of opportunity for a unique set of entrepreneurial qualifications.

The attitudes and preoccupations of businessmen at any given time are deemed important by historians both as clues to and reasons for business action. The year 1900 is a promising one in which to probe those attitudes and preoccupations because at that time a great many important characteristics of the business community were undergoing rapid change. Examination of business literature of the day suggests that the businessman of 1900 was preoccupied with the merger movement and with labor agitation, with shifting distribution patterns, and with trade association activity. His concern with financial techniques and public relations was intense, if erratic, and he was preoccupied with problems of administrative structure. He was, in short, concerned with those developments commonly emphasized by historians, but with so much more besides as to suggest several new research avenues. Surprising results emerge when business attitudes and preoccupations of 1900 are compared with those of 1956.

Public accounting practice and the nature of the accounting profession itself has, in the years under consideration, been shaped by a series of external forces. The Great Depression stimulated codification and regulation of practice. Further refinements of auditing procedures were introduced in the wake of the McKesson & Robbins case. The basic question of who was authorized to practice received almost continuous attention, and was the subject of much legislation and some important legal action. World War II introduced new practices, added responsibilities, and certain difficulties. And finally, the emergence of a strong national organization provided the profession with a means for achieving internal consistency and the capacity for co-ordinated reaction to rapid external change.

In the early days of the Republic, opposition to a national bank derived from fear, ignorance, and a basic cleavage of prophecy. To many persons banks were synonymous with speculation; others viewed them as “aristocratic engines” designed to advance the interests of the few over those of the many. Most important, however, was the discrepancy of viewpoints between those who envisaged an agricultural nation and those who already sensed the embryonic stirrings of a vast industrial economy. To the htter, a strong central bank seemed indispensable. The struggle to establish the First Bank of the United States emphasized the rural-urban cleavage that was to influence much nineteenth-century history. It was also a conspicuous early recourse to implied Constitutional powers, anathema to States' Rights defenders and a great hope of businessmen in a still feeble nation.