Over a century ago Henry Shaw climbed the business ladder in St. Louis, and in his later years he did much for the culture of his adopted city. Shaw left behind many records of his career. Those pertaining to his business have been deposited in the Baker Library at Harvard University. The records are voluminous and as yet unused, except in so far as they have been examined for the purpose of the following tentative statement. The collection includes personal accounts, real estate records, family correspondence, and business records, such as waste books, journals, ledgers, invoice books, and bank balances. The collection of letters is particularly significant and valuable, for it deals with many subjects, including importing and exporting, and covers the whole period of Shaw's activity in America.

A subject in the history of business that is waiting to be studied is the development of ideas on how business should be conducted and, secondary to that, how business men should be trained. Training in tool subjects—writing, bookkeeping, etc.—is almost as old as business, and commercial geography and law have long been considered proper subjects for the aspiring young merchant's clerk to study. As for the science of business, that field has been left almost entirely to the economic theorist, with the result that it has not in reality been a “science of business” at all.

Some time ago an interesting manuscript volume was brought to the office of the Society for examination, by Frank G. Neal, Jr., of Wells, Maine. It was the account book of a Joseph Gatchell of that place, chiefly for the years 1797 to 1808 with occasional entries through 1816.

John Coggan, the first merchant of Boston of whom there is any record, began business in 1634. He thus was presumably well established as a retailer by the time Robert Keayne entered the same type of business a year or two later. Unlike his fellow merchant, who was in 1639 fined heavily by the general court for charging too high a mark-up on certain imported goods, Coggan seems to have abided by Boston's principles of just price, which allowed the retailer to sell at 4 pence on the shilling above the cash cost in England.

The Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures, the oldest industrial corporation in the United States, is now in process of liquidation.