Before 1920, the year in which railroad consolidation received Congressional sanction, three periods in the history of rail development the time of the Civil War the chief purpose of consolidation seems to have been to unite short connecting lines to form through routes between important terminals, usually with the approval and assistance of state legislatures. A good example was the chartering of the New York Central Railroad in 1853 by the New York legislature following the amalgamation of ten companies operating short lines in a chain of roads between Albany and Buffalo, New York. A second stage of consolidation developed from the unparalleled construction and intense intercompany competition that followed the Civil War when railroads felt the need of large systems both to offer effective service over widening geographic areas and to offset the disastrous effect of competition upon an industry of expensive, fixed, and specialized capital. It was during this period that the major eastern trunk and western transcontinental systems were formed. State laws designed to prevent the combination of competing lines were widely circumvented, or made inoperative, and the prohibition of pooling in the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 and of trade (and traffic) associations in the Sherman Act of 1890 gave new impetus to the use of consolidation as a means of escaping the enervating effects of competition. In the years following the Panic of 1893, when one fourth of the country's rail mileage passed into the hands of receivers, the use by the railroads of several new legal devices, including the interlocking directorate, the holding company, and the community of interest, not only counteracted antimonopoly legislation but produced a third and still more impressive phase of consolidation.

The relation of theoretical economics to empirical historical analysis has been one of the central problems of economic historians ever since the recognition of economic history as a separate discipline. Recent studies in logic and philosophy, by constructing new frames of meaning for both theory and history, have opened up several avenues for a fresh approach to this and other problems of importance to the historian and the economist.

My two predecessors assure me that our association is too young to possess any precedents or traditions. In the matter of themes for presidential addresses the only foreshadow of a tradition seems to be the cult of variety and free choice. My own choice of subject is therefore influenced by the fact that during the past year I have been writing a biography of our first president and America's first native-born thoroughly trained economic historian, Edwin F. Gay. As I followed the career of one member of our guild in the making, comparisons with others would persist in cropping up, and the question took shape: “What are economic historians made of?”

What happened to the standard of life of the British working classes in the late decades of the eighteenth and the early decades of the nineteenth centuries ? Was the introduction of the factory system beneficial or harmful in its effect on the workers? These, though related, are distinct questions. For it is possible that employment in factories conduced to an increase of real wages but that the tendency was more than offset by other influences, such as the rapid increase of population, the immigration of Irishmen, the destruction of wealth by long years of warfare, ill-devised tariffs, and misconceived measures for the relief of distress. Both questions have a bearing on some political and economic disputes of our own day, and this makes it difficult to consider them with complete objectivity. An American scholar (so it is said) once produced a book entitled An Impartial History of the Civil War: From the Southern Point of View. If I seek to emulate his impartiality I ought also to strive to equal his candor. Let me confess, therefore, at the start that I am of those who believe that, all in all, conditions of labor were becoming better, at least after 1820, and that the spread of the factory played a not inconsiderable part in the improvement.

Many students of Franklin discuss his Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc., as a precursor of Malthus' Essay on the Principle of Population? overlooking the more significant fact that Franklin's essay is part of an extensive movement to analyze population trends, a movement dating at least from John Graunt's Natural and Political Observations … upon the Bills of Mortality (1662). Just as every writer on physics from Newton to Einstein has something to say aboutmotion, Franklin and Malthus as writers on population naturally discuss some common concepts. The similarities are not remarkable. As John Adams observes, “That the first want of man is his dinner, and the second his girl, were truths well known to every democrat and aristocrat, long before the great philosopher Malthus arose, to think he enlightened the world by the discovery.” The real significance of Franklin's essay lies in its influence in drawing attention to the potential economic and military strength of the Colonies and hence in contributing indirectly to the restrictive measures of the British colonial policy, the very policies that it was written to forfend.

One of the recent tendencies in the United States has been the movement away from private methods of finance to finance through government agencies, a trend that has been particularly noticeable during periods of national catastrophe such as wars and depressions. In these periods we have seen, in addition to other sources of government financing, the use of the War Finance Corporation during World War I and the use on a far larger scale of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation during the Great Depression and World War II.

During World War II two thirds of a total expenditure for industrial facilities of approximately $25 billion was directly financed by the government. In contrast, during the three-year period of 1917–1919, only about one tenth of the $6 billion in new facilities under construction was directly financed by the government.

One might have supposed that historians, largely occupied as they have been with the activities of ruling classes, would have been among the first to study systematically the problem of the recruitment and tenure of elites. This problem is an especially interesting one in a country such as the United States which has had no official caste systems and no legally established hereditary hierarchies. Yet most American historians have shied away from it. Few of them have even raised questions about the locus and transmission of power or status in modern times. Moreover, those who have discussed in particular the ascent of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century business leaders have tended to attribute their success simply to the possession of more shrewdness or trickiness or more pluck or luck or other private qualities than competitors who failed to rise; the very few historians who have considered social determinants such as family background or work experience have, by stressing the alleged values of poverty or of starting business in boyhood, placed their emphasis, as we shall see, quite at the opposite pole from where it belongs.

In 1914 I was a student in college and according to our textbooks the nature and operation of the gold standard was a subject that presented few difficulties. Countries, we learned, were on the gold standard if they selected as a unit of account a certain weight of gold of a certain fineness and made their currencies convertible into gold at the rate fixed by this definition. If, in addition, such countries placed no restrictions on the export or import of gold they were on an international gold standard. When the major trading countries of the world simultaneously adopted arrangements of this kind, we had what was, in effect, a sort of international convention concerning the treatment of gold which we described as the international gold-standard system.

The study of French enterprise and entrepreneurship is rewarding for two major reasons. In the first place, anything that will help explain the present weakness of French industry and commerce throws light in turn on one of the most important political phenomena of the last 150 years: the fall of France from hegemony under Napoleon to the position she holds today. Secondly, the history of French business and businessmen is significant precisely because of France's relatively minor place in the economic world. If we are to weigh the validity of the recent emphasis of theorists on the role of the entrepreneur qua se in the over-all process of economic change—on the contribution of the personal element to the impersonal operation of the system—we must consider not only the more “modern” nations but those less industrialized as well. It will not suffice to study the progress of American or German business and deduce therefrom impressive theories on the importance of the businessman. The converse must also be examined: To what extent are certain attitudes and values inimical to the development of enterprise ? Or concretely in the case of France, to what extent have the character and mentality of the French financier, industrialist, or merchant been responsible for the relatively retarded status of the country's economy ?

The political history of gold in the United States is inseparable from X that of silver. In large measure it is simply the obverse of the history of silver. Looked at positively, the case for silver was an attack on gold monometallism; looked at negatively, the case against silver was a defense of the single gold standard. Another and very practical reason for relating the history of gold to that of silver is that the story of what has happened to silver affords an enlightening parallel to what is happening, and conceivably may happen, to gold.

The development of American agricultural techniques in the period JL prior to 1800 may be thought of as occurring through the amalgamation of the techniques and resources of the Old World and the New. The first half of the nineteenth century, though dominated by the changes imposed by agricultural expansion on the frontier and by a growing urban population, featured also careful evaluation of the differences between American and European agriculture, a process that resulted in extensive but selected borrowings. The middle of the century witnessed declarations of American technical independence on the basis of equality and indeed superiority over Europe in some areas and the dominance of the idea that henceforth agricultural progress would depend on America's own exploration and experimentation.

IN recent years much has been said and written about milk as the most nearly perfect of all modern foods, but it is important to realize that it is also the most venerable of human nutriments. Its use began long before recorded history, and it has continued throughout the ages to be a staple part of the human diet. Man's making friends with the lactating animals, such as the cow and the goat, was a significant step in the advancement of human nutrition and therefore of civilization as well. Butter and cheese proved to be important ways of preserving the food values of milk, and their invention, though probably accidental in both instances, was an important contribution to human nutrition. In the long history of dairying, custom and accidental discovery have probably been more important than conscious experimentation and innovation.

It is my purpose in this paper to sketch briefly one heretofore ignored facet in American economic history: the influence of British capital, knowledge, and livestock in the growth, development, and eventual decline of the Western range-cattle industry during that colorful, though all too frequently disastrous, period between the American Civil War and the end of the century. Although the locale of this story would seem to confine its interest and importance largely to the West, it was, in fact, an incident of profound national and international importance. It filled the press of the United States with glowing descriptions of great baronial estates teeming with hundreds of thousands of head of cattle; it brought about long articles of analysis, praise, sharp criticism, and denunciation in the British press; it resulted in an internationalbattle of words involving at least three American secretaries of agriculture, presidents of the Board of Trade, ministers of agriculture, and chancellors of the exchequer. There were rude questions in the House of Commons and pointed inquiries in Lords. There were even letters to The Times!