The President's determined foreign policy pronouncement focused attention upon both the lack of unanimity in business circles and a surprising capacity for independent American action in international finance. For historians, the Venezuelan Message is a challenge inviting efforts to probe the depth and longevity of cleavage between public policy sentiment in the financial and industrial-mercantile sectors of the economy.

The first third of the twentieth century completely transformed the practice of industrial relations in American business. Three principal motivating forces may be identified. These not only fluctuated in time, place, and influence, but have received unequal and less than impartial historical attention.

Like most speculative extravaganzas, the Western cattle boom was compounded out of a bona fide opportunity, exaggeration, gullibility, inadequate communications, dishonesty, and incompetence. There were some solid residual benefits, representing, in effect, an involuntary gift by British investors to their American cousins.

The transition from simple record keeping to accounting more or less in the form we know it today took many hundreds of years, though most of the basic developments had occurred by early Renaissance times. The advance of the art was intimately linked with a growing literature, the advancement of status, and other recognizable signs of maturing professionalism.

Some later observers, impressed perhaps by rapid progress of the art after 1900, showed disdain for nineteenth-century methods. Five principal factors, however, produced a steady evolution and made accounting an element of importance in the nineteenth-century American business world.

The career of this influential accountant illuminates, with colorful Victorian overtones, the beginnings of the investment trust movement and the heyday of British international investment.

This monograph is another in a bibliographical series designed to call attention to accessible major repositories of business history source materials, describing both the basic collections and recent acquisitions.

Like the financial mart from which it derives its name, OVER THE COUNTER is designed for the types of exchanges not handled elsewhere. This feature has its origin in a demand among readers of business history for a place to compare ideas, voice comments on published articles and reviews, and publish research essays. Contributions are invited. The Editor and Advisory Board reserve the right to decide whether, on the basis of general interest, pertinence, and merit, such contributions will be published. OVER THE COUNTER will appear as often as the volume of contributions may dictate.