In The writing of economic history at present there is a tendency tofocus attention on the quantity of material goods and of people. This is not because economists seriously maintain that the chief end of man is to produce a maximum population, each member of which has at his disposal a maximum amount of material things. I do not think many economists or economic historians hold such a materialistic belief-why then would they choose to be professors ? We merely write as if we did, or at least we too often write so that we can be thus misinterpreted; and we are the more likely to be thus misinterpreted because the great political powers of the present, the United States and the Soviet Union, using different ideologies, each extols, paradoxically, its material productivity as proof of the force and validity of its ideals.

The revolutionary technological changes that have come to typify our modern industrial society were first felt in the New England textile industry. The American zeal for useful improvements that greeted the industrial revolution was counterbalanced by a patriotic fear that the ill consequences of European manufacturing would be repeated here. The textile manufacturers who introduced the factory system into the United States early in the nineteenth century found it necessary, in order to win a full measure of public support and secure workers in a land where labor was dear, to demonstrate that “the moral standards of the community would not be impaired.”

On August 26, 1935, delegates from sixty-five American Federationof Labor locals in the automobile industry gathered in Detroit to launch the International Union, United Automobile Workers of America. Although many of the delegates thought that the A.F. of L. had unnecessarily delayed the convocation of this convention, they were no doubt mindful of the fact that an international was being formed in an industry where only a little more than two years previously unionism had been conspicuous primarily because of its absence.

The war between Britain and France, extending over some twenty two years down to 1815, lies across the great formative period of modern Western society. Like all of its kind, the war may be regarded from two points of view: First, it altered the societies involved in it, as fighting needs conflicted with peaceable ones; second, it affected the nexus which binds countries together—trade and its financing.

Among the national unions that grew up in the decade after the Civil War none made so great an impression on the public mind during its career as the Knights of St. Crispin. Like all transitional movements, die order combined nostalgia for the past with a daring experimentalism in confronting the cordwainers' problems. Previous histories have neglected its forward-looking aspect, perhaps because the harking back to what was lost was eloquently set forth in publications, while the experiments are found in the practices of local unions, little understood even by those who made them. Only in the perspective of time can we see how much more significant were the actions of the rank and file than the speeches and editorials of tradition-bound leaders.

Taken as a whole the half century from 1835 to 1885 was a periodof substantial economic growth in the United States. The population increased nearly fourfold, or at an annual rate in the neighborhood of 2½ to 2½ per cent per year. Estimates of the national income show a figure at the end of the period six- or sevenfold as large as that at the beginning, the equivalent of an average growdi rate of about 3½ to 4 per cent per year. A crude available estimate of national wealth suggests about a tenfold change, or an annual growth averaging close to 5 per cent. These growth rates for income and wealth do not need to be adjusted downward for price changes, because the available wholesale price indexes suggest that in the middle of the 1880's the price level was a little lower than in the middle of the 1830's. The figures are not to be taken as first class statistical data. They merely indicate the apparent order of magnitude of the degree of growth.

When one compares ancient and modern economic institutions, the differences are many and deep. One of the most obvious is the appearance of slavery virtually everywhere among those societies that rose from simple village life to civilization. Social and economic specialization, the resulting necessity for interchange of goods, and a higher political organization in a firm, consciously organized state—these are aspects of the appearance of civilization, and with them one usually finds a spectrum of social classes from aristrocrats to slaves.

In The concept view of many economists the just price is a nebulous concept invented by pious monks who knew nothing of business or economics and were blissfully unaware of market mechanisms. It is true that certain writers, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, have done their best to accredit this fairy tale and to propagate the notion that the just price, instead of being set by the allegedly blind and unconscionable forces of the market, was determined by criteria of fairness without regard to the elements of supply and demand or at least with the purpose of eliminating the evils of unrestrained competition.

Today's best-known price indexes for Wholesale Price and Consumer Price Indexesthe Unitedof theStates are the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Indexes of Prices Received and Paid by Farmers, issued by the Department of Agriculture. These indexes, however, are comparatively new. The “Wholesale Price Index” dates from 1902 with indexes covering the years 1890-1901. The “Consumer Price Index” is of even more recent origin. Retail food price indexes were established on a regular basis in 1901, again with data back to 1890. Other goods and services were not added until after World War I, with estimates back to 1913 based on special studies in shipbuilding cities. The “Index of Prices Received by Farmers” was issued by the Department of Agriculture in 1924 and “Prices Paid by Farmers” in 1928. Botfi of these series were extended back to 1910.

Since the end of World War II Americans interested in international economic affairs have faced a painful dilemma. Almost every set of international policies advanced during this period has called for the widespread use of American capital to assist in the development of underdeveloped areas in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The United States government has furnished much of this capital during the last decade, but private capital has borne a share of the effort in the past and may well be called upon for a larger share in the future. Unfortunately, in a period of frequent small wars, revolutions, and expropriations, American investors naturally hesitate to send their capital abroad if they can invest it profitably at home. One of the most vexing problems in modern international economic relations is that of predicting or assuring regular returns from American investments abroad.

The year 1886 was destined to be a crucial one in the history of the American labor movement. The eight-hour crusade, the numerous strikes, the Haymarket bomb, the entrance of workingmen into the political arena at the state and national levels, and the mushroom growth of labor organizations all contributed to the agitation and excitement of the year. Yet the importance of these events was overshadowed by a development that was to have such far-reaching implications that it would determine the future of the labor movement for the succeeding half century. That development was the declaration of war by the trade unions against the reform unionism of the Knights of Labour.

The works of Labrousse and Chabert on income fluctuations in pre-and post-revolutionary France have already been subjected to abundant criticism by Professor Landes in the November 1950 issue of THE JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC HISTORY. The present note results from an attempt at resolving in a constructive way certain of the contradictions observed between Labrousse's inferences and his data. The argument, originally developed on the basis of observations in the decade immediately preceding the French Revolution, was extended to cover the thirty years (1815-1845) following the fall of Napoleon's empire. After a short review of Labrousse's “grain crop” interpretation of French economic cycles, it is shown that (1) his computations of feudal revenues do not agree with his description of their cyclical pattern and (2) grain revenue figures are only consistent with an elastic demand for bread over a certain range. This squarely contradicts the inelasticity assumption which underlies both Labrousse's theory and Landes' criticism of it. The treatment of eighteenth-century bread demand as price-inelastic had already wide currency among contemporary economists, and does not seem to have been seriously challenged ever since. An inductive analysis supported by scattered pieces of empirical evidence is then developed, with the conclusion that demand for bread (and grain) should indeed be elastic over the relevant region. The last section represents an extension of this interpretation to crop and price data in the post-Napoleonic period.

War is a drain on resources, both of manpower and of materials. The object of government financial policy in time of war is primarily to ease the real drain by making its monetary counterpart work as smoodily as possible. In a long and brilliantly written book R. S. Sayers has provided a meaty account of Britain's financial policy during World War II. Any serious study of the problems of war finance or the financial history of World War II would do well to begin with this volume.

Applications of the staple approach by the late Harold Innis d by others influenced by Innis have produced many studies which, taken together, provide a remarkably coherent, plausible, and apparently consistent account of Canada's economic growth and history. In this paper I distinguish between the staple theory as a theory of economic development and as an economic interpretation of history and argue that the staple theory of Canada's economic development breaks down after 1820. In the conclusion I suggest an alternative, complementary approach to the study of the country's economic growth.

Historical demography is indeed what Father Mols calls it, a “science des confines” (Vol. I, Introduction, p. xvi), a discipline which is doomed to cultivate the boulder-strewn and not easily accessible borderlands between half a dozen fields of learning. In a territory such as this the first clearings are of necessity a matter of small-scale enterprise; that is to say, local research predominates. But this has been proceeding on a broad front; the difficulties encountered have not been great enough to discourage the pioneers. Indeed, the amount of labor expended on local or regional investigations into problems of historical demography beggars description: antiquaries and genealogists, statisticians and students of medical history, sociologists and economic historians have combed thousands of records and accumulated mountains of quantitative as well as symptomatic evidence regarding past populations.

J. D. Gould in a fairly recent article attempts to explain why Thomas Mun did not develop the “self-regulating mechanism of specie distribution.” I find Mr. Gould's argument unconvincing and while I hesitate to question one point in an otherwise interesting atricle, I think the point merits further discussion.

We have reason to be grateful to Mr. Danière for bringing the thesis of Professor Labrousse to our attention once again. For this is not just an ordinary thesis. Since its statement in the thirties, it has become a staple of French historiography, shaping and informing the work of a whole generation of scholars. Such terms as “crise d'ancien type,” “crise de sous-production agricole,” and “économie des blés et des textiles” have become stock phrases, and few French historians would think of discussing any trade crisis before the middle of the nineteenth century without laying special stress on the causative role of inadequate harvests. Indeed, the fame of this thesis has so flourished with time and Professor Labrousse had become so closely identified with the problem of agriculture and the cycle, that any kind of link between harvests and farm income on the one hand and business conditions on the other–even where the relationship observed is the opposite of what the Labroussian model would lead one to expect–has been enough to make scholars cite his name in evidence.