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.

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.

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 ?