In a long list of publications since 1923 Harold Innis with industry and insight set a pattern for the study and interpretation of Canadian economic history. The University of Toronto, the Dominion Government, and Canadian learned societies in their various fashions paid tribute to the high quality of this achievement. His career, moreover, was a refutation of his own generalization, perhaps playfully formulated, that no Canadian scholar could secure recognition in the United States. He was a charter member of the Committee on Research in Economic History, the second president of the Economic History Association, and at the time of his death president of the American Economic Association.

Local governments played a notable and somewhat neglected part in the American movement for internal improvements. Their activities in aid of canals and railroads varied greatly in scale and method and in the scope of planning involved. They ran the gamut from the far-flung projects of great commercial cities striving for the dominance of the trade of vast areas to the donations of obscure rural townships trying only to make sure that the promised railroad should pass through their village rather than the adjacent crossroads. Among the greater cities, none played a more notable role than Baltimore in the promotion of internal improvements. Its total of railroad subscriptions, loans, and bond endorsements was about twenty million dollars—a figure of municipal contribution only exceeded by Cincinnati's investment in a city-owned railroad. Baltimore was in the field of internal improvements well before Cincinnati and remained in it long after such early rivals as Philadelphia had withdrawn. Baltimore's first investment in the Baltimore and Ohio was audaorized in 1827, and its last loan to the Western Maryland was made in 1886. It continued to vote stock and to appoint public directors to the board of railroad corporations until it sold its interest in the Baltimore and Ohio in 1890 and in the Western Maryland in 1902.

The economic significance of the lottery business is a subject which historians have generally neglected. This is unfortunate, for both in Europe and the United States the lottery was at one time a capitalmobilizing device of major importance. It appears worth while, therefore, to explore in some detail the operations of a lottery firm that seems to exemplify some of the features of the system in its most mature form. This is the firm of Yates and McIntyre, lottery managers in New York State and elsewhere between 1821 and 1834.

The question whether business, or capitalism, has been a force for peace or for war has been one of some historical interest. Before 1914 there were few to challenge the thesis of the great liberal-capitalist ideologists—Comte, Spencer, Fiske, to name only outstanding specimens —that the triumph of free enterprise meant the end of war, or its progressive decline; that the businessman would make a world in which the arts of peace permanently displaced those of war. But after the World War there naturally arose schools which sought to establish that capitalism carried within itself the seeds of ferocious wars. The thinking of a disillusioned generation was powerfully influenced in this direction. The loosely drawn but vehement indictment of capitalism as partner of Mars can be read in such typical pieces of the ʼ30s as H. N. Brailsford's Property or Peace (New York: Covici, Friede, 1934) and C. H. Grattan's Preface to Chaos (New York: Dodge Publishing Co., 1936). But these Marxist theories have been subjected to devastating criticism.