An Essential factor in the rise of the investment banker to a dominant position in the American economy in the decades following 1880 was his command of the mobilized savings of the country's financial institutions. While considerable research has been devoted to the investment bankers' domination of transport and industry, little attention has been paid to their organization of financial institutions and their significance for the development of these institutions and their reorientation toward the securities market. This paper is a study of the relationship between the large life insurance companies and investment banking in the years immediately preceding the Armstrong Investigation.

In A society operating completely on the principles of economic individualism, each adult person would be expected to make provision for his own needs and for those of his dependents. He would have to earn enough to provide food, clothing, and shelter, as well as develop the necessary frugality to lay by enough to care for himself and dependents during periods of illness and unemployment. He would likewise be expected to make provision for old age and for funeral expenses. The duties of an adult person in society would be looked upon as being not only economic but also moral in nature, requiring the constant making of choices in expenditure, not merely of what goods to buy but of the spacing of expenditures over long periods of time. If a person met with economic reverses and could not provide, he showed himself to be incapable of dealing with the problems of a responsible adult and ought not to look to others to get him out of his predicament. His condition would be considered to result from lack of the moral qualities required of a person who had taken upon himself the responsibilities of adult life.

Napoleon's successful campaigns against Austria in 1805 and 1809 led to the signing of the treaties of Pressburg and Schonbrunn which placed interalia the eastern shores of the Adriatic in French hands. The entire coastline from Trieste to Cattaro became part of the Illyrian Provinces designed to act as a barrier against British trade, to provide a land route between Turkey and the French empire, and to weaken Austria.

The appraisal of the period when America was governed by the Articles of Confederation as one of stagnation, peculation, and disunion so long popular with writers of the Fiske “Critical Period” school has been attacked quite successfully in recent years by such writers as Merrill Jensen. While challenging many popular, misconceptions concerning the period, he has also demonstrated that the mercantile situation was by no means a hopeless one and that long before 1789 the states were moving in the direction of an increasing co-operation on matters affecting interstate and international trade.

R. C. O. Matthews' full-length study of British fluctuations in the 1830's is good history and good economic analysis. There is no equivalent book on a single cyclical passage, not even excepting the great interwar boom and slump in the United States.

More than a decade ago, Arthur Gayer, W. W. Rostow, and Anna Jacobson Schwartz completed their remarkable work of collaborative scholarship. Preoccupation of the authors with other usks during and after the war was, it is stated, the main cause for the delay in publication; but one may surmise that with a study of such full-bodied proportions as was originally put together, the ever-rising cost of publication was also a factor. Fortunately, the surviving authors (Mr. Gayer died in 1951) have not been too reverent of the arduous fullness of their well-planned product. They have accepted the expedient of microfilming to meet their purpose of making unpublished parts accessible to other scholars. How generous their prewar intentions were is indicated by the list, occupying nearly seventeen pages in Volume II, of full texts of several sections and of tables of monthly data on prices of stocks and commodities, as well as other basic matter, which will be available through the Columbia University Council on Research in the Social Sciences, which has fostered the study virtually from the conception of the project by Mr. Gayer twenty years ago.