The long and glorious commercial history of Amalfi, which began some time about the middle of the eighth century, came to an abrupt end on November 24, 1343. On that day a raging storm accompanied by a tidal wave destroyed the lower town and swallowed all the harbor installations, including the famed sea fortifications. From that blow Amalfi never recovered. The present lovely resort appears as a most unlikely setting for a republic which was once a great maritime town in the western Mediterranean.

The American people have usually been regarded as forward-looking and progressive, willing frequently to move their activities from one place to another to attain their hopes and inclined to be impatient with the heritage of the past. But there seems to have been, almost from the beginning, a minority of people in this country who found pleasure in looking back over the road that they and their forebears had traveled and in encouraging a scholarly chronicling of such progress. Perhaps the fact that so many early immigrants came from western Europe, with its much longer high-ways of economic and cultural advance, had something to do with this. But there was also the circumstance that the early settlers in America, as well as many later migrants to our West, were a Bible-reading people. The Bible is, after all, a record of movements among peoples through the centuries, and the duty placed on members of Protestant churches to become thoroughly familiar with their source of divine guidance could well have implanted a bias toward, or a fondness for, historical ideas and writings. And the citizens of a new country, it may be suggested, could hardly fail to be conscious of change through time as a true fact of life.

The opinion that spice prices rose in Europe in the century before 1492 and that that had something to do with Europe's oceanic expansion is remarkably persistent, in spite of the blow delivered to it by A. H. Lybyer more than a half-century ago. A distinct drop, however, in the price of spices, and particularly of pepper, between the decades 1420-1430 and 1440-1450 is indicated by a recent study of Antwerp prices, which thus reinforces the suggestion of older scattered figures from Navarre, England, and Klosterneuburg (Vienna). Pepper fell about 50 percent in that interval and did not return to its former high level until after 1498. In view of Venice's preeminent position in the trade in those decades, Venice is the obvious place to look for the source of a decline of prices generally in the West. Wholesale prices of pepper at Venice, 1363-1510, drawn mainly from diaries, merchants' account books, and letters, are shown in the accompanying Table 1. This explains the fall in prices in northern and western Europe. After selling at between 83 and 157 ducats per cargo in 1411-1426, pepper prices at Venice fell to 50 in 1432 and drifted lower in the 1440's and 1470's, occasionally even going below 40. Rarely did the price rise above 55 ducats a cargo until the interruption of Venetian voyages by the war with the Ottoman Turks in 1499.

The Reciprocity Treaty between the British North American Provinces (Canada) and the United States was ratified in February 1855 and terminated in March 1866. It provided for free trade in all natural products, free access for United States fisheries to the Atlantic coastal waters of British North America, and access to the St. Lawrence River for American vessels under the same tolls as native vessels.

The September 1966 issue of this Journal contains a study by Professor Irwin Feller on the rate of adoption of the Draper Automatic Loom in the New England cotton textile industry. I have no quarrel with his central conclusions concerning the economic rationality of the New England cotton manufacturers. I do, however, have some comments on his analysis of the relative costs of producing cloth on plain (power) as opposed to automatic looms.

Professor Sandberg in a very helpful comment has accepted the main conclusions of my paper on die economic rationality of New England mill owners with respect to the adoption of the Draper loom but has raised certain questions as to my handling of some of the data used to reach this conclusion and of the very representativeness of the data themselves.

Approximately two years ago Stanley Lebergott took issue with the finding “that the rise of the railroads was relatively unimportant” to the American economy of the nineteenth century (p. 438). Lebergott dis-missed the low estimates of social savings as “startling but uninteresting,” and offered an alternative estimate of railroad importance. He asked the important question “by how much the railroad reduced real costs of transport from those that would have prevailed under a regime of wagoners and boatmen” (p. 441). He approached the answer by way of two other questions. Given cost and technological data, “what was the maximum volume of goods that could be distributed per year by a mile of canal and by a mile of railroad where both could reasonably be built? And how great was that volume per dollar of investment?” (p. 422). Using nineteenth-century data in his inimitably artistic manner, Lebergott fashioned an answer suggesting that the consequences of railroad construction were “surely the stuff of significant economic change” (p. 466).

Is a railroad like a toy wind-up set, the locomotive moving endlessly, stupefyingly around a single circle of track? Or, as I believe, is it more like a fancy set, with various sidings, and connecting routes? Professor Weiss assumes that the carrying capacity of a railroad is bounded by its ability to store all its freight cars on the main line. And the view he (somewhat incorrectly) attributes to me—that “for every starting point there are 10 miles of clear road ahead”—is nothing more than the belief that a real railroad is not a simple circle. For railroad sidings do exist for inventorying cars. And connecting railroads that move cars out of a particular system do exist. Economists who contrast the productive capacity of Ford and GM rarely worry about whether a week's production can be stored within the factory. Entrepreneurs envisaged slack variables before they were baptised as such. (If sidings did not exist, or were a significant portion of the cost of one transport system but not another, matters might be quite different.)