Every learned profession possesses an historical background, a traditional heritage, upon which all contemporary practice is based. In accountancy, the summarization of this background is found in the lives of practitioners who have combated business secrecy and unethical procedures, and elevated the profession in the regard of the general public. Members of the profession of public accountancy owe a deep debt of gratitude to their predecessors who have not only sustained it in the regard of the layman but, in addition, advanced its principles and techniques.

Editor's Note: For the student of business history China has had a peculiar interest. It has illustrated forms and stages of business policy, organization, and technique which have nearly disappeared in the western world but which flourished there in medieval and early modern times. China, in a sense, has been somewhat in the nature of a contemporary ancestor of modern business as we know it. China's town economy, still generally prevailing in the great interior, is reminiscent of the town of medieval and early modern Europe with its small artisans and tradesmen and its market places which characterize the town and petty capitalist system of business; while China's commercial cities have marked the survival of the sedentary merchant and mercantile capitalism, long the great and coordinating business of the East as indeed it was of the West until about a century ago.

A few miles from my home, there nestles in the friendly atmosphere of the Green Mountains of Vermont a hamlet of fifty people, known as South Reading: just a sleepy little neighborhood now, but formerly a thriving, active community. Here were located a map-printing shop, several sawmills, a grist mill, a woolen mill, a chair factory, a smithery, and a tannery.

During recent years there has sprung up among the country's leading universities a demand for courses in the history of business enterprise in the United States. Americans are coming to realize that one of their country's greatest contributions to civilization has been in the field of business administration and technology. With that realization has come a desire to know something of the background and meaning of America's achievements in these fields.

Do we know what capitalism means? Are we annoyed by what seems a change in the use of the term? How about some other words of high import, such as democracy, labor, people, religion, communism, fascism? How can we be scholars, journalists, politicians, or even intelligent voters without having a clear concept of these terms? Or is it just a matter of pedantry that I am insisting on? Perhaps the extreme points of view are expressed by the words “scholarship” and “propaganda.” The propagandist certainly wants no limitations put upon his strategic use of terms. He is a master in intellectual crookedness and is irked by any effort that cramps his style.

A new research organization in the field of business history has recently been established, the Business History Foundation, Inc. Chartered under the membership corporations law of the State of New York as a non-profit organization, the Foundation is designed to carry on and facilitate research in the history of business and to assist in the publication of the results of such research. It will be financed by gifts from individuals, institutions, and companies.

After the Revolution merchandise locally manufactured was largely custom-made for the consumer. America's colonial merchants had combined the rôles of importers, exporters, bankers, middlemen, and shopkeepers. Only gradually, in the larger eastern centers, manufacturing other than for direct consumer use developed. It continued as a handicraft, however. The employer disposed of his surplus over local requirements through peddlers who scoured the adjacent countryside on foot or in peddlers' carts. As New England factories and mills developed, shoes, dry goods, tinware, cloth, clocks, firearms, hats, salt, and all the miscellaneous output of its infant industries were peddled throughout the land. Experience as a peddler was the school for the Yankee youth of the day destined for a mercantile career. Out of the towns each spring poured a hoard of young men with flowered carpetbags or with tin trunks strapped to their backs, afoot or with horse and wagon, headed for as distant a point as the Canadian border to the north or as far as Georgia to the south.

Pope & Talbot, Inc., pioneer San Francisco lumber and shipping firm, has made a $17,500 grant to the Stanford Graduate School of Business for the writing of the hundred-year history of the firm.

The research and writing will be done by Edwin T. Coman, director of the Graduate School of Business Library and assistant professor of business history. Miss Helen Gibbs, as research associate, will assist in the research and writing.

In connection with some research in the field of banking history the author recently came across the William Jones Papers, acquired a few years ago by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. These records, which are of unusual interest in many respects, are the basis of the present essay.

William Jones (1760-1831), as is generally known, was a Philadelphia shipping merchant and, during the War of 1812, both Madison's Secretary of the Navy and Secretary of the Treasury pro tem. In 1816 he became, for political reasons, the first president of the second Bank of the United States, but he resigned as early as January, 1819, after an inefficient and unsuccessful administration.

The use of highly specialized techniques for financing equipment on railroads in the United States became common soon after the Civil War. Comparatively little is known, however, of their origins and early evolution. Much of the published information on early railroad equipment financing is concerned with federal, State, and municipal government aids to the new railroads. Because public financing was a matter of public record, that story has been preserved in considerable detail. Unfortunately this has not been the case with private financing. The lack of specific data in this field has obscured important historical precedents for the equipment trust and conditional sale agreements, which were to become so important in the later decades of the 19th century. It is particularly interesting, therefore, to examine some original and hitherto unpublished manuscript material which presents examples of railroad equipment financing as early as 1838.

Institutional advertising, that artful device for infiltrating the subconscious, is capable of assuming a myriad of forms. A firm may use it to keep its name frequently before the public — the American Telephone and Telegraph Company is an example of first magnitude — or a segment of an industry, the nation's privately owned utility companies, for instance, may seek to promote their mutual interests. Sometimes the appeal may be purposefully direct: in 1905, N. W. Ayer & Son undertook the specific task of reëstablishing public confidence in the New York Mutual Life Insurance Company after the devastating investigation of the Armstrong committee.

The commercial drummer seems to have occupied an important place in English trade for some time before his services were widely employed in this country. An article in Hunt's Merchants' Magazine in 1839 called attention to this situation and suggested that American business men were missing a real opportunity in not adopting similar methods. English drummers who called on the country trade had already acquired the stock characteristics that Americans only at a later date recognized as belonging to the occupation — the sample case as a badge of identification, together with a thorough grasp of the latest scandal for the entertainment of customers.

The chamber of commerce, which today varies widely in the range of its activities and functions, has had a long and important history. As an association of business men, its history goes back at least to Roman times; the first such association to bear the name “chamber of commerce” was that of Marseilles, established in 1599. The organization we know as the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York was not only the first association of business men for the purpose of furthering their interests to be launched in America; it also ranks among the world's oldest of such institutions, established and conducted independently of government, which exist today.

Business history as a separate field of academic study and research came into being twenty years ago this autumn. At its beginning it was little more than a name, but in those twenty years notable progress has been made in the development of research and teaching in the history of business. Basic research in business records has created a considerable fund of information. Wide preliminary explorations of the field have been made and a systematic concept of business genesis and evolution has been formulated. Courses of instruction in business history, whether nominal or real, have been established in several American universities. And increasingly over the years business men have been taking an interest in the subject.

The original settlement at Newbury, Massachusetts, in 1635 was along the Parker River and, although it was an agricultural community, small vessels were built there as early as 1680. The greater facilities of the area fronting the Merrimack, known as the “Port,” caused that section to increase in population and commerce, but not until 1764 was this locality cut off from old Newbury and incorporated as Newburyport.

In this complex world little can be done without records. Correspondence, memoranda, reports, surveys, inventories, plans, charts, blueprints, fiscal records, legal records, and hundreds of other varieties are all needed so that modern society can function with some degree of control. Business records are accumulating at a staggering rate; for example, one insurance company has acquired over 800,000 cubic feet in a period of about 70 years. The war period with its increased production and added personnel has, of course, accentuated the entire problem.

When the Constitutional Fathers decided, during that hot summer of 1787, “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Time to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries,” they sought to establish a means of rewarding men for the products of their talent and ingenuity. But, in so doing, they also laid the groundwork for many a subsequent lawsuit. Not infrequently the true originator of an idea or device could not be easily determined. Often several inventors, though starting from different points, arrived almost simultaneously at similar discoveries.