“Imperialism is no word for scholars.” I quote my own printed words of ten years ago. The bewildering changes of content and color of that chameleon word throughout the brief century of its existence are. now being explored by R. F. Koebner of the University of Jerusalem. Here indeed is a fit task for scholars—to take a key word such as imperialism or despotism, to trace the history of its usage and abusage, to fit it into its true context of ideology, propaganda, and political warfare throughout successive historical phases. What a scholar can NOT do with these emotionally reverberant words is to make them reliable instruments of scientific exploration and explanation.

Many writers treating the late colonial period have touched uponthe subject of economic fluctuations, but no agreement is found as to the duration, intensity, and amplitude of these alterations of good and bad times. Nor has any investigation as yet assembled all the available data necessary to an understanding of this phenomenon. Since agriculture constituted an important aspect of the colonial economy, some light may be shed upon these economic vicissitudes by an examination of Northern agricultural conditions in the two decades preceding the Revolution.

Tradition depicts American business as the chiefexploiter of our national free immigration policy during the latter defender andhalf of the nineteenth century. The contribution of immigrant labor to the building of the American industrial empire is much discussed. The interest of employers in recruiting cheap labor and strikebreakers from Europe is a familiar story. That industrialists and their allies in the years of rapid expansion and mechanization of the American economy stood to gain as much as any other group, even including the aliens themselves, from the maintenance of large-scale immigration has appeared so obvious as to demand little careful investigation. Historians have ordinarily described the succession of laws after 1882, gradually narrowing the “open door” the United States offered to Europe and pulling in the welcome mat as well, as a series of labor and nativist victories in the face of dogged resistance by the business world. Yet such an interpretation fails to explain the fact that the period which saw the growth of strong anti-immigrant feeling among native workers witnessed a strikingly similar development in the ranks of businessmen. During the 1880's and 1890's, while labor leaders protested the competition of alien workers, business publications were criticizing no less bitterly the impact of immigration upon American society. When nativists sought financial support for their efforts to restrict immigration they found many businessmen in sympathy with their aims. Measures presented to Congress for regulating and limiting the admission of aliens were frequently concurred in by prominent business leaders. Indeed, a notable development in American business thought after 1880 was the rise of hostility toward the swarms of cheap foreign laborers which employers had long considered essential to their own, and the nation's, prosperity.

Few men have had a worse posthumous press than Langdon Cheves of South Carolina, second president of the Second Bank of the United States. He has generally been portrayed as an able lawyer but ignorant of economics and banking—and often as a narrow deflationist who saved the Bank but ruined the country. Vexed by criticism, he is frequently supposed to have gladly bowed out in favor of the better trained Nicholas Biddle.