At first, the early Massachusetts railroads did not fix the passenger and freight rates on the basis of any theoretical rate-making formula. Instead, they met the competition of wagons and stages and, where necessary and possible, the steamboats. The railroad directors wanted to assure the stockholders reasonable and regular dividends, but I have seen no evidence that the directors expected to maximize the profits, even within the limits of the charters. Only an occasional director was willing to risk the possibility of greater profits by experimenting with extremely low rates on the theory that really cheap, improved transportation sufficiently increases the demand for transportation to justify the lower fares.

The Chinese have a proverb to the effect that language is used to conceal intentions. Notwithstanding their traditional frankness, Americans have written letters designed to mislead the reader. Certainly no series of letters, whether from clergymen, politicians, or businessmen can be taken uniformly at face value. But how may statements be discounted or interpreted in such a way that one may draw the correct meaning from them?

Usually the letters of one man are used in connection with the preparation of a biography of their author or the detailed analysis of a series of his actions. In either case cumulative knowledge of the writer's idiosyncrasies, continuing motivation, and, most of all, his actions themselves provide clues to acceptable interpretations. But when one reads the letters of a large group of men engaged over the course of many years in a common occupation, all of these conventional indicators are lacking.

While Jacksonian democrats moved resolutely to abolish the National Bank of the United States and denounced the very idea of such an institution as being incompatible with liberty, Governor José Felix Trespalacios, colonel of the imperial armies of Mexico and political chief of the Province of Texas, promulgated a decree in the historical city of the Alamo establishing the first “national” bank in the Americas west of the Mississippi. “Consonant with my duties,” he declared, “and mindful of the interests of this beautiful country and the deep regard in which I hold its inhabitants, I hereby order and command that a National Bank be established temporarily in this Province, subject to its ultimate approval by the Government.”

In the economic affairs of Britain the mid-nineteenth ccntury was the age of the relatively small and independent employer, conscious of a long-established prowess which had been surpassed nowhere in the world and in the conduct of the affairs of his works but little affected by the embryonic factory legislation and the feeble trade unionism of the time. Equally the large combine with its tendency towards standardization of conditions had still to come. Lord of all he surveyed, the employer's views on conditions of work are a good index of what actually was.