The concentration of business enterprise in corporate structures at the end of the last century called the attention of scholars to the history of the business corporation, the chartered joint-stock company. Even those who agreed that “the honour of originally inventing these political constitutions entirely belongs to the Romans” realized that their modern economic functions were relatively recent and demanded explanation. In this country, Williston's brilliant essay, the studies of Simeon Baldwin, and a number of other investigations probed into the origin and nature of the institution at about the period when it became a pressing social issue.

In constructing his social theory Saint-Simon made use of the inductive method: by the study of historical facts he endeavored to win knowledge of the laws of the character and movements of society. In shaping his spiritual program he followed a different path, the path of deduction: his goal was to find a great principle in accordance with which the institutions of the future social order could be consciously molded. “Socrates,” he said, putting his ideas into the mouth of the great Greek, “clearly understood that we must criticize a posteriori and organize a priori.” For “any social regime is an application of a philosophical system, and, consequently, it is impossible to institute a new regime without having before established the new philosophical system to which it should correspond.”

Perhaps there exists no better index of the increased sophistication of research in American economic and business history than the enhanced, still expanding utilization of manuscript materials, especially the records of individual businessmen and corporations. One has only to compare the scholarly productions of a generation ago—Copeland's Cotton Manufacturing Industry, Eliot Jones's Anthracite Coal Combinations, or Lippincott's Manufactures in the Ohio Valley—with nearly any first-class corresponding volume of recent years—for example, in the series edited by N. S. B. Gras—to be struck with the greatly increased reliance of recent and contemporary authors upon unpublished materials.

During the past winter the New York Committee on Business Records has dealt in a practical way with one group of the difficulties discussed by Arthur Cole in his article, “Business Manuscripts: A Pressing Problem.” This committee has sought to solve the problem by convincing executives that business records are of value not only to themselves but also to scholars, by advising businessmen how they may best arrange their records, and by learning under what conditions scholars may have access to business archives.