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.

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.

Kenneth Wiggins Porter's two-volume work, The Jacksons and the Lees: Two Generations of Massachusetts Merchants, 1765–1844, is the first of two studies in the history of business to be presented to the members of the Business Historical Society during the present year. The presentation of the first study is made possible by the courtesy and liberality of Mr. Henry Lee Shattuck. This work by Dr. Porter, who will be remembered as the author of John Jacob Astor: Business Man, is in the nature of a composite business biography of a group of merchants throughout the long period from 1765 to 1844.

The Harvard University Press has just published a history of The Massachusetts-First National Bank, 1784–1934, by N. S. B. Gras, Professor of Business History at the Harvard School of Business. This, the fourth work to appear in the series entitled Harvard Studies in Business History, has been made available to members of the Society through the generosity of the First National Bank of Boston.

Every business concern has to use records of many types. They are expensive to prepare, they soon lose their current value, and they tend to accumulate in large masses. Modern business destroys great quantities of records and correspondence every day because storage often seems expensive and unnecessary and because the future reference value of such material is not appreciated. It is neither possible nor desirable to keep all business records indefinitely. A business concern has more important things to do, and must avoid unnecessary expense. But selected material should be permanently preserved by individual firms because the historical information which it contains is of definite educational value (1) to the firms themselves, (2) to historians who are trying to study important aspects of human experience, and (3) to the general public which is served by business and which ultimately governs the conduct of business.

The institutions and techniques for aiding the flow of capital and credit have had a long history. But it is a history which is not well known, especially in its earlier stages. In America the business of dealing in credit was at first chiefly in the hands of merchants, and, immediately after independence was established, chartered commercial banks took up the work. Some of the larger banks served as financial wholesalers, mobilizing credit and loaning it to small banks which were essentially retailers.

Among the papers presented to the Society by Mr. Gordon Dexter, whose death is noted in this issue of the Bulletin, are several communications relating to the Ship Living Age. This vessel was wrecked in 1855, shortly after leaving Shanghai, bound for New York with a cargo of teas. The story of the episode is of interest here because it not only recalls the dangerous adventures which were attached to sailing on the high seas in the nineteenth century but also the serious physical risks involved in foreign commerce less than a century ago, especially in the Pacific trade.

In the history of business one finds a universal inclination to oppose new techniques which threaten to undermine established enterprise. Today this tendency is seen in the United States in the fight against chain stores and mail-order houses; a hundred years ago the new auction system of wholesaling was under fire.

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.

Through the courtesy of Mr. W. M. Angle, of Rochester, New York, the Business Historical Society has acquired the papers of the recently liquidated Moseley & Motley Milling Co., of Rochester, which had ground wheat on the Genesee for almost a hundred years. The federal processing tax hastened the demise of this concern, but its end would no doubt soon have come for other reasons, for both capital and management could find more profitable employment in other industries in Rochester.

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.