Who today can be compared with Robert Owen, the “great manufacturer with a bent for benevolence” who rebelled against the crudities of a vigorously expanding industrial organization? The difference between Owen and our great modern benefactors is perhaps that they are always manufacturers with a bent more or less accentuated for benevolence, while Owen's bent became a fanatical passion to redeem a hostilely suspicious world which ultimately repudiated him.

This issue of Business History Review is devoted to financial crisis, business failure, and scandal. As readers of this journal know, white-collar fraud is not a new phenomenon. Public and private authorities have confronted the problem for a long time, looking for ways to deal with it that will not stifle economic growth.

Heirs to the Populist-Progressive tradition in Congress declaimed, in the 1920', against low rediscount rates, the use of bank credit for speculative purposes, the rising volume of brokers' loans, and the flow of money to New York from the hinterland. In the bull market environment of the day the warnings went unheeded, in part at hast because of their origins.

The glamor of the American whale fishery has tended to obscure its economic outlines and significance. For certain areas one of the first successful efforts at natural resources exploitation, the fisheries developed centers of highly specialized technical and administrative skills. Capital amassed in whaling was a far from inconsequential economic force when it was shifted into other channels of investment. The shifting process itself highlights the circumstances surrounding a dying industry and provides an example of variant national investment patterns.

The establishment of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris in 1799, following a conception for a museum of science and industry outlined by Descartes a century and a half earlier, was the beginning of a type of institution which has great significance to business history. Many industrial museums have since been established. Some have grown to vast exhibitions of industrial machines and processes, such as the Science Museum in London, the Deutsches Museum in Munich, the Technical Museum in Vienna, and the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. In America and in Europe many smaller museums have also been established to illustrate some particular aspects of industrial development. Among the outstanding ones in America are the Edison Museum, established by Henry Ford in Dearborn, Michigan, the Industrial Museum of the American Steel and Wire Co. at Worcester, Massachusetts, and the John Woodman Higgins Armory, of the Worcester Pressed Steel Co.