During the months of July and August, several members of the staff of The Business Historical Society, Inc., found it possible to combine business with vacations and to make a number of connections of national and international importance.

Building was an event in seventeenth-century America. In 1637, a “schoale, or colledge,” for which the Massachusetts General Court had voted four hundred pounds the previous year, was “ordered to be at New Towne.” The next year, the name of New Towne was changed to Cambridge, and the “colledge was ordered to be called Harvard College.” Thirty-four years later, the first building was falling into disrepair. The towns of the colony were called upon to make an appropriation for a new one, “of brick and stone,” and the agency for building it was given to Deacon John Cooper and one William Manning.

The history of liquor, from the time when Noah “planted a vineyard and drank of the wine” to the controversy over the eighteenth amendment to our Constitution, has been presented to the Society by the heirs of George C. Dempsey. Everything pertaining to the subject is liberally represented: receipts for wassail bowl (to be served with three pieces of toasted bread floating in it), milk posset (the receipt furnished by Sir Walter Raleigh), and 'rack punch (the beverage on which the Collector of Boggley Wallah disgraced himself at “Vanity Fair”); legislation, from the excise laws under the Stuarts to the licensing of American saloons; what the complete brewer should know; adulteration of liquor; temperance; prohibition; and the praise of wine.

The recent accession of the Hancock papers to The Business Historical Society collection recalls a now forgotten type of merchant once prevailing in Europe and America. He was sometimes called the merchant prince; certainly he represents the highest class of business man from at least the thirteenth to the early nineteenth century. Sometimes he operated alone; sometimes with his brothers or cousins in the form of a family partnership.

The members and friends of The Business Historical Society will be happy to learn of the constructive program that has been adopted for the coming year. The Society, in conjunction with the Harvard Business School, has undertaken to publish the first periodical devoted to the history both of economics and of business, for the benefit of the members. This journal will be a pioneer in its field. Any number of publications deal with economic research, but these are exclusively modern in their interest.

Among the collection of prints on economic and business subjects belonging to the Harvard Business School are two of the old French port of Saint Malo. A fine engraving of a map of the same town has recently come to the School from the noted French scholar, Léon Vignols, together with other interesting prints on such subjects.

A very amusing picture of an East India voyage in the early 'sixties is left us in one of a small collection of log books recently presented to the Society. By the time of the Civil War the importance of sailing craft was already on the wane, but it was not until after the war that the real change from sails to steam power began, and in 1862 a fleet of vessels still made profit of New England handicaps by carrying ice to the tropical ports.

The Byron Weston Company, paper manufacturers of Dalton, Massachusetts, have been using the historical route to publicity through a contest for the purpose of unearthing old American documents. The prize stories were collected into a book entitled “Dead Men Tell Unusual Tales,” and The Business Historical Society has been presented with a copy.

A collection of manuscripts, replete with details which rebuild the picture of foreign commerce in the 1840s and 1850s, has recently been given to The Business Historical Society by Mr. Gordon Dexter, whose father, an officer in most of the companies whose papers make up the collection, preserved the records which have so fully come down to us. It is chiefly composed of the cheques, bills, accounts, contracts and correspondence of William Appleton and Company, and the successor of that firm, Samuel Hooper and Company, merchant shipowners of the type described in the previous article.

When to-day the visitor to one of the fairest countrysides in the world sees Saint Malo rise proudly from its rocky islet, surrounded by ancient walls, like a vessel about to put out to sea, he finds it difficult to imagine that this port once played a great part in the commercial and maritime history of France. Nowadays a great port must be situated at the mouth of a great river or it must serve as outlet for a rich agricultural and industrial region. It must be capable of accommodating ships of large tonnage. Saint Malo fulfills none of these conditions. But, until the nineteenth century, when boats, even those engaged in making voyages to distant parts of the world, were of very slight tonnage, (generally from 200 to 400 tons), conditions were different. Saint Malo was a busy port with an active commercial life. The development of a commission and carrying trade rendered an important and fruitful hinterland less necessary then than now; and in troublous times the security afforded by a strong military situation was much appreciated.

Vocational guidance, as an effective development, has come only since the beginning of the century. But as long ago as 1795 Henry MacKenzie protested against wasting the years of youth at school “improving talents without having ever discovered them.”

Again in 1836, the idea appears in a book entitled “The Panorama of Trades and Professions,” a copy of which has come to the Society, written by Edward Hazen of Philadelphia. The book was “intended for the use of Schools and Families, as well as for miscellaneous readers.” In the preface, Mr. Hazen deplores the fact that “many individuals mistake their appropriate calling, and engage in employments for which they have neither mental nor physical adaptation,…and hence arise, in great measure, the ill success and discontent which so frequently attend the pursuits of men.”

Daniel Defoe, in his “Tour Thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain,” says of the town of Maiden in 1761,

“Here is a good public Library for the Use of the Minister and the Clergy of the Hundreds adjoining to the sea; and any Gentleman may borrow a Book, upon depositing the Value of it.”

It would give him a great deal of satisfaction and some surprise if he could see the Baker Library, where thousands of books of commercial interest may be consulted freely by every citizen of Boston. One might suspect that it would give him even greater satisfaction and surprise him less to see his own commercial pamphlets in a place of honor in the Librarian's Room. Perhaps the most versatile of English writers, he apparently had economic matters nearest his heart; for as he traveled through England, though he noted everything of interest in a given place, he dwelt lovingly and lingeringly on its commerce or fishing, manufactures or farming, the rent of its land, and the reasons for its poverty or prosperity.

An old ledger, which has come to the Society, belonging to the proprietor of the Boston Exchange Coffee House, recalls the part once played by taverns in social and commercial life.

“A true picture” of frontier life in Illinois is preserved in the reminiscences of a Yorkshire woman who, with her husband and five young children, immigrated in 1831. From the time she left England to the time she returned for a visit, mistress of a large and thriving farm, she maintained her indomitable courage, and the critical aloofness of the foreigner.

Her first night in Illinois was spent in a log cabin, where the “little lady, exceedingly fond of smoking, as Americans generally are, particularly the females,” expected to be paid for her hospitality, even though the family used its own provisions. The Yorkshireman, on whose recommendation they had come, appeared shortly, “verily, as ragged as a sheep,” and they moved their quarters to his house, which “was more like the cell of a hermit who aims at super-excellence by enduring privations than the cottage of an industrious peasant.”

In 1711, Englishmen interested in news from North America were entertained by a representation of the efficiency displayed by Canadian beavers in dam building, engraved in the border of a “New and Exact Map of the Dominions of the King of Great Britain” on this continent. The map is in an atlas of Herman Moll, a prominent British cartographer of the early eighteenth century. The atlas is a recent acquisition of the Society. This particular map is in great demand by public utility companies, as the first historical reference to the production of water power in America, and copies of it, when they can be found, bring from two to three hundred dollars.

“The Industrial and Commercial Correspondence of Alexander Hamilton,” the first book published under the auspices of The Business Historical Society, incorporated, was sent to each member of the Society toward the last of February.

The founding of a society in Norton, Massachusetts, in 1797, for the detecting of horse thieves bears witness that the crime wave is a perennial phenomenon.

Sir William Petty, in the seventeenth century, says, “A Lottery…is properly a tax upon unfortunate self-conceited fools…. Wherefore, a Lottery is not tolerated without authority, assigning the proportion in which the people shall pay for their errors, and taking care that they be not much or so often couzened, as they themselves would be.”

Mr. Joseph P. Day of New York has again added to the collection of the Society, this time with an interesting assortment of three English books from the eighteenth century, and a fourth relating to the canal-building fever with which American cities were taken early in the nineteenth. The first item consists of two volumes of quotations on the London Stock Exchange, in 1725 and 1737. The earlier one is published by “John Castaing, Broker, at his Office at the Stationers, next the General-Post-Office in Lombard-Street”; the second by his widowed sister and another broker, Richard Shergold.