Professor Gras has asked me to talk today on government regulation in the field of Finance. When he first mentioned the matter it seemed to me a most stimulating suggestion. The more I considered it, however, the more difficult the assignment appeared. The more I thought about it the more the subject seemed to be made up of a large number of topics relatively unrelated to each other. Management of insurance companies can hardly be treated in the same paragraph with the divorce of security affiliates from commercial banks, and competitive bidding has little in common with measures designed to protect bank depositors. While many of the particular segments of this subject possess great interest in their own right and deserve careful individual treatment, they are for the most part technical and cannot be dealt with adequately in the time at my disposal. Moreover, they are in many instances special subjects. By this I mean that they have wholly different backgrounds, that their internal logics are dissimilar, and that the kinds of knowledge needed to see each in its proper perspective are quite disassociated. The problem is to knit this compartmentalized subject together so as, on the one hand, to see it as a whole, and on the other hand, to avoid somewhat empty generalities.

The Bulletin received in December an announcement of the hundredth anniversary of the Graniteville Company.

Observation of the operation of a number of large companies has convinced Professors Clough and Cochran, the two most active members of the New York Committee on Business Records, that in most companies no official is satisfactorily taking care of the problems of record management.

On Monday, April 13, 1840, one William Bement moved to his farm at Northumberland, west of the Hudson River and north of Albany, New York. On that same day he started a diary in which he not only meticulously recorded the conventional observations about the weather but also set down details of his activities as a farmer and considerable information about the financial side of his farming. The diary ends abruptly on Sunday, February 20, 1842, apparently because Bement's career as a farmer was then coming to a close.

The public utilities furnish numerous and outstanding examples of government regulation and later government control if we follow the distinction between these which Professor Gras has indicated. Aside from water, the oldest of our utilities are those furnishing artificial gas, beginning in Baltimore in 1816. The early franchises or charters granted to these utilities represent, according to Professor Gras' definition, extreme forms of government regulation, because these franchises or charters actually fixed rates and prescribed the character of service to be rendered for very long periods of time, say for fifty years or double that length of time. In the case of our earliest railroad charters, granted beginning about the middle 1820's, the power to make rates was often granted to the Boards of Directors of the companies. Some States, while permitting the rates to be made by the railroads themselves, did make reservation of such power to the State if need arose for exercising it.

Two major universities in the United States have recently added to their curriculum work in business history.

Freeman Hunt, the founder of the first general business magazine published in the United States — known today as the Commercial and Financial Chronicle — was also responsible for the publication of the first series of biographies of American business men. Biographies of mercantile capitalists and a few industrial capitalists were a regular feature of his Merchant's Magazine and Commercial Review from its beginning in 1839, and in 1855 and 1857 appeared the Lives of American Merchants edited and published by Hunt.