Geographers and city planners, endeavoring to explain or foretell changes in urban population, sometimes use an approach called basic-nonbasic. A basic factor is one which brings in money from outside of the city and which usually sells its products beyond the city limits. The nonbasic factor furnishes services and supplies to the city. Thus a factory would normally be a basic factor, while grocery stores, barber shops, and similar institutions, together with most professional groups, would be nonbasic. A factory employing a thousand workmen would add to the city not merely the workmen's families but about an equal group of nonbasic families, perhaps a total of six or seven thousand persons. This concept is a very useful one in modern society and is worth testing for its possibilities for medieval settlements.

Critical readers of The Public Lands. Studies in the History of the Public Domain, edited by Vernon Carstensen, whatever the merits of its other features, cannot but be struck by the fact that separate charts showing interest in the public lands—as evidenced first by income from sales and second by the total of land entries in acreage—differ so widely. One explanation for some of the difference is that Arthur H. Cole, in compiling the data for the charts showing income from sales, seems to have used the calendar year, whereas the chart showing original land entries is based on the data for the government fiscal year. Another difficulty is that the Cole chart is prepared from manuscript schedules in the old General Land Office and they do not coincide with the published data in the Annual Reports of that office.

The general sentiment of Congress toward resumption of specie payments had become more and more desultory, not to say negative, during the early part of the 1870's. Nevertheless, the Resumption Act was passed in 1875, and resumption of specie payments at the pre-Civil War parity occurred on schedule in 1879. Observers have slighted this incongruity. Passage of the Resumption Act has come to be regarded as a true reflection of Victorian sentiment; ultimate resumption in 1879 was the proof of the pudding.2 What seems to have been lost in this rationalization of cause and effect is the generally unfavorable light in which resumption was being viewed in the middle 1870's, the alternatives that were available in lieu of resumption, and some of the forces of “immorality” that made these alternatives attractive.