No Matter which authority we consult on the English Poor Laws in the nineteenth century the same conclusion emerge: the Old Poor Law demoralized the working class, promotedd population growth, lowered wasges, reduced rents, destroyed yeomanry, and compounded the burden on retepayes; the poverty which it relieved; the problem of devising an efficeient public relief system was finally solved with the passaage of the“harsh but salutry” Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. So Unanimous are both the indictment and the verdit of historians on this question that we may forego the pleasure of citing “chapter and verse.”

From 1841 throught 1845 and again in 1847 and 1848 ofiicials of the United States patent Office estimated the output of the principal agricultural crops of each state and territory. These estimates have been generally disregarded by economic historians, presumably because their acuracy has been considered questionable. But I have bee unable to find any published, comprehensive evaluation of them. In this note I will briefly examine the methods used to make the crop estimates and apply a few checks againsts the results, with the object of evaluating them, in a preliminary way, as historical data.

In September 1833, Andrew Jackson issued an executive order ending deposit of Federal funds in the Bank of the United States, which had been the government depository since 1817. The culmination of Jackson's long struggle with the Bank and its friends in Congress, this measure closed a chapter in the political history of the era. To the conservative Jacksonians, “victory over the Bank of the United States was a consummation” that freed the state banks and business enterprise from the control of a powerful and despised institution. To the radical, hard-money faction of the Democratic party, however, “removal of the deposits” (as the order was popularly termed) was merely a first step toward more fundamental reform—elimination of the monetary disturbances that they attributed to reliance on bank paper for the currency of the country. Because of this divergence of views, partisan and factional disputes over Jacksonian financial policy did not cease with victory over the Bank. Central to the continuing debate was the relationship of die Treasury Department to the group of state-chartered banks, usually called the “pet banks,” in which Federal funds were deposited after September 1833. My purpose here is to review Treasury operations in die period 1833–1841, to suggest the political role of die pet banks and the economic impact of financial policy in die administrations of Jackson and Van Buren.

When requested in the spring of 1961 to review the overdue third volume of The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, I read eagerly the proof copy sent me and then wrote this review, fearing that if I delayed until the volume was actually out the lapse of time would dull my reactions. Time had already blunted the impact of some of the contributions, for example, the opening essay, “The Rise of Towns,” by H. van Werveke. No wonder, since he finished writing it, as he tells us in a footnote, in 1940 (sic), and retouched it in 1953 and 1956 Such long-suffering contributors deserve to be reviewed before 1963, but only in this year has the Cambridge University Press finally released the last of the three volumes planned as an authoritative and balanced account of the economic life of Medieval Europe.

The terminal dates of this study are the year of the foundation of the Crédit Lyonnais and the year of the transfer of the management from Lyons to Paris. Until 1882, the siège social remained in the south, though from the late 1860's on, the initiative in the larger financial operations lay with the “succursale” in the capital. To satisfy the requirements of what Bouvier calls a two-headed direction, an extensive, daily correspondence was indispensable. The result is one of the richest banking archives ever opened to an inquiring researcher. It is not only their abundance that makes these records of the Crédit Lyonnais so valuable; it is their quality, the subjects they treat, the insights they give into the problems and minds of the directors of the bank. These papers deal with matters that today would be confined to conversation—directly or over that bane of the future researcher, the telephone; they concern not only decisions, but the reasons for decisions and the debates that lay behind them. Even if such thoughts were consigned to paper today, the records would in all likelihood end by being removed from the premises as the personal property of their authors. Given the catholicity of interests of the Credit Lyonnais—its activity in the regional and national economy, its innovations in French banking practice, its wide excursions into the field of international finance—its archives are a broad gateway into the economic history of the late nineteenth century.