Sixteen years ago, in happier times, Europe seemed about to become again what she had been to our American parents of the Victorian Age—a rich expanse of industrious and (according to the standards then prevalent) comfortable daily life, ornamented everywhere by monuments emanating from generations of culture, blessed by opportunities for quiet leisure, for travel at what was once considered a rapid pace, and for serious discussions of philosophy and art, such as provided Henry James and Henry Adams with the indispensable nourishment they missed at home. Sixteen years ago, for several weeks on end, I shared to my advantage a table in a modest Basque inn on the French side of the Pyrenees with a distinguished economic historian. In addition to our wives, we had as our companion an elderly professor from a lycée in Bayonne, named Georges Herèlle. We were told that the old gentleman was the greatest authority in France, if not in the world, on the Basque language. He was also the French translator of two writers then prominent, the Spaniard, Blasco Ibáñez, who rose to fame in the United States with Rudolph Valentino riding simultaneously all his “four horsemen,” and the Italian poet, Gabriele d'Annunzio, whose name was known round the world in those prehistoric times before any one had heard of “Mussolini,” let alone of “Hitler.”

I am in entire sympathy with Mr. Nef's emphasis on historical synthesis or over-all interpretations, which is certainly in order after a period in which analytical fragmentation has been so stressed. We are also in agreement concerning the need for a study of the interrelationships between various aspects of history that are now usually treated as specialties.

It is a kind of report on progress I am making this afternoon. In the last year or so a few of us have talked a good deal with corporation executives about opening their past records to historians now, and putting them in places where they can serve historians for generations to come. We have had some success; we have met some obstacles. I want to report on both to this Association, whose interest in the matter is the same as mine.

Like Mr. Pargellis, I am concerned with the history of business and the businessman. He has a professional pride in seeing a better job done and he proposes to put into the hands of scholars the necessary tools to improve the quality of their work. My approach is that of a businessman who is disturbed by inadequate and sometimes prejudicial use of facts and the possible effect upon the general welfare of conclusions based on misstatements. Both of us want the writing and teaching of history to be factual and fair and as thorough as possible. I have no quarrel with Mr. Pargellis' point of view or with the remedy he suggests, and I agree readily that, in so far as imperfect knowledge of American history is due to lack of access to records, the cause should be removed. I cannot but feel that general acceptance of his proposal by companies whose files have been preserved will go a considerable way toward improving the situation and I do not see what harm could come from making such reports available to scholars, provided of course that in using them consideration be given, as Mr. Pargellis says, to “the ethical and legal standards of the time, with full appreciation of the political and competitive setting in which a businessman had to work.” The availability of corporate documents certainly would tend to prevent the making of careless or misleading statements, which without the records might go unchallenged.

The prices of commodities and wages of labor recorded in contemporaneous account books are the oldest continuous objective economic data in existence. Economic historians have not neglected this great intellectual resource. In fact, during the last hundred years a large proportion of the outstanding economic and historical talent has been lavished upon price history. Tooke, D'Avenel, and Rogers devoted more than twenty-five years each, at the most productive stage of their careers, to collecting price and wage statistics from manuscript sources and to writing an impressive total twenty-odd learned volumes. In the present century Beveridge in England, Elsas in Germany, Posthumus in the Netherlands, Pribram in Austria, Bujak in Poland, Bezanson and Cole in the United States, and a host of lesser lights on both sides of the Atlantic have uncovered new sources, combed old ones more exhaustively, and employed modern statistical technique to give us relatively complete and refined histories of prices in the leading economic areas of the Western world in modern times. If the old records of commercial transactions are not destroyed in total war, it seems safe to assume that future generations of scholars, seeking light from the past on recurrent inflation and deflation, will produce price histories that surpass all studies yet written in historical range, completeness, and scientific accuracy. In view of these achievements and prospects, social scientists should ask themselves what can be gained from a proper utilization of price history and what losses may result from its misuse.

The role money has played, and still plays, in the evolution of social organization and individual behavior remains a dark area though some corners besides price history have been studied intensively. You know better than I how much has been written by anthropologists, numismatists, and historians about such matters as the different forms of money men have used, the evolution of coinage, the relation of gifts and piracy to the rise of regular trade and organized markets, the commutation of dues in kind and services into money payments, the transformation of an agricultural peasantry into an industrial proletariat, the changing methods of governmental finance in war and peace, the development of credit and banking, the spread of bookkeeping and its refinement into accounting, the diverse forms of business enterprises, and the interrelations between making goods and making money. Some of the monographs I have read upon these and related topics are admirable pieces of work. But monographs are flashlights; they do not give general illumination. What we do not yet have, what we need, and what economic historians should supply is a coherent story of how monetary forms have infiltrated one human relation after another, and their effects upon men's practices and habits of thought. I am well aware that the spadework desirable for this job is far from completed; but even now wellequipped students could draw an authentic sketch of the process as a whole. By so doing they would both stimulate detailed research and enlighten the thinking of all who are concerned with social organization, past and present.

During the century which culminated in the First World War, Great Britain was the principal source of capital supply for countries that drew upon foreign resources. Until 1940 her claims as creditor remained substantially greater than those of any other nation. Investments grossing from forty to fifty billion dollars have been made in the course of her virtually continuous process of capital outlay abroad. The outstanding total in 1914 amounted to twenty billion dollars, yielding an annual income of about one billion, which was nearly one tenth of the national income of the United Kingdom. This was the result of a process of accumulation which reached its greatest intensity during the periods 1868–1875, 1884–1893, and 1905–1912, when annual public issues of foreign and colonial securities averaged 6 or 7 per cent of those outstanding. During the latter period, at least, more than half of all British investment of new capital was being made abroad.

Edwin F. Gay, my predecessor, in the inaugural presidential address of this Association described the continuity of the history of economic history from Europe to North America as illustrated in his own work. As your second president I represent a later stage of this continuity, a student of Chester W. Wright who in turn was a student of Edwin Gay. I am in a sense one of Edwin Gay's grandsons. This, particularly as it appeals to my strong Scottish interest in genealogy, provides the only satisfactory explanation I have been able to find of the honor you have done me in appointing me his successor. For the same reason it is a source of satisfaction to me that my successor can be said to fill the intervening gap as one of Edwin Gay's sons.