At thirty-seven John Luccock was looking forward with quiet assurance to a gentle transition into the comfortable middle age of a sedentary merchant. Napoleon and Jefferson spoiled his view, and before he was thirty-eight he had gone rolling down to Rio. There for ten years he imported and exported; watched a sleepy colonial outpost transform itself painfully into an imperial capital city; rambled, notebook in hand, around the almost trackless interior of Brazil, studying the remnants of an aboriginal culture and the way of life of those who had come to conquer. At forty-eight he returned home, leaving his health and middle age behind him. At fifty-six he died.

The organization of a commercial firm or a corporation is usually J. determined by the nature of its business. We must, therefore, know the meaning of the word “bank” which appears in the title of this study. Today this word has a variety of meanings. There are all sorts of banks: central banks, commercial banks, member banks, and so forth. In the fifteenth century, there were not so many kinds of credit institutions. But still the word “bank” had more than one meaning. What kind of a bank was the Medici bank?

In spite of a vast critical literature of increasing agreement, Shaw is stillregarded by many as an irresponsible clown and by many more as a negligible thinker on serious subjects. No one can read about him without realizing that he is anything but negligible. Mr. T. A. Knowlton has thought his economics worthy of lengthy and respectful treatment, and many authorities have attested to his importance in the history of socialism. In her recent work Mrs. Helen M. Lynd says that the Fabian Society developed under the inspiration of Shaw; he “set its early tone.”