In the manner of the Creole tradesmen of Louisiana, whose lagniappe to their patrons is legendary, the Editor offers a similar bonus to readers of the Review. Instead of trifling presents added to a purchase, however, our lagniappe will be notes and documents illustrative of the evolution of business enterprise.

As the oil industry grew, comfortable family firms, hitherto untouched by the ferocities of competition, found their position under attack and their independence menaced. The painful, inexorable process of substituting a new economic order for an old is here detailed from the viewpoint and records of one of the dispossessed.

Probably most Americans who read Dumas' immortal Three Musketeers and its sequels have no clear idea of the coins in question when the great novelist writes of pistoles and louis d'or. And though the louis d'or was coined for only about a century and a half, it has left, thanks to a fortunate combination of circumstances, a lasting mark in history.

As a challenge for further research and analysis, Professor Kirchner suggests some of the cultural differences encountered by Western businessmen in Russia which significantly shaped their conduct of trade.

Business history and business inevitably share the problem of dealing with records in bulk. Here is a suggestion that historians borrow and adapt certain techniques that have proved effective in solving the problem for business.

When I agreed to recount the story of the Business Historical Society, I naturally thought it was my own swan song that was expected. The occasion was presented to me as the probable closing of a period in the history of the Society and the opening of another day. On thinking over the events of the last twenty-five years, however, I have discovered a number of facts of larger issue and have had a chance to peer beneath the curtain of changing circumstances of world-wide import. The Business Historical Society is not just one more of those numerous American organizations that display our national weakness. It was set up under circumstances of high import by men who were feeling their way toward something significant which they but vaguely understood. In this story, therefore, are revealed some of the social processes which are the fabric of our history. There is, indeed, very little of the merely antiquarian in the theme with which we have to deal—the first survey of the Business Historical Society's experiences.

In the manner of the Creole tradesmen of Louisiana, whose lagniappe to their patrons is legendary, the Editors offer a similar bonus to readers of the Review. Instead of trifling presents added to a purchase, however, our lagniappe will be documents illustrative of the evolution of business enterprise. It is hoped thus to provide a wider availability of the raw materials of business history to teachers and researchers.

Although the system of capitalism may be very old, the concept of such a system belongs almost wholly to the last hundred years. I shall deal with only five views, thereby leaving to others such additions as they think fit.