On August 26, 1857, just two days after the New York branchthe Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company suspended payment, of, the New York Herald predicted that the financial difficulties then beginning were certain to acquire the proportions of a great crisis. It boasted, moreover, that it had foreseen and warned of this impending calamity for the preceding twelve months, but its warnings had been spurned. The Herald's vaunted prescience perhaps stemmed chiefly from the long-standing prejudice of its publisher, James Gordon Bennett, against the operations of speculators in Wall Street. As early as 1854, when the speculative boom in railroad stocks was halted by a sharp decline of prices, the Herald had predicted the imminent approach of a crisis, one that would mark the end of the current “Fitful Spasmodic System” of American business. During the winter of 1854–1855 business stagnated, unemployment increased greatly, and there was considerable distress and popular unrest, especially in New York City. Here was an advance view, as it were, of the pattern of depression which was to develop in 1857.

In the last decades of the Tsarist regime the eight provinces where, according to the census of 1897, Ukrainians predominated—Kiev, Podolia, Volhynia, Poltava, Chernigov, Kharkov, Kherson, and Ekaterinoslav—were largely rural. Less than one seventh of the population in these provinces inhabited urban centers. The rural population, moreover, coincided closely with the Ukrainian nationality: more than nine of every ten Ukrainians lived in the country districts, and most of these were classified as peasants. Since two out of every three of the urban residents were Russians or Jews, the limited number of Ukrainians dwelling among them tended to become absorbed into industries which provided a natural milieu for “Russification.” In the cultural conflict, “Ukrainian” became synonymous with 9peasant”; and the nickname for the Ukrainian—khokhol—has the same derogatory connotation as the Russian term muzhik, which evokes a picture of a shaggily bearded, unwashed, unkempt, illiterate country bumpkin.

The elaborate Chinese standard histories, which, if all translated, would fill several hundred thick volumes, provide illuminating information about many aspects of economic history. In this paper, I shall present a passage that enables us to estimate the gold stock of the Chinese at the beginning of the Christian era, a type of information rarely available.

In his History of the Former Han Dynasty, Ban Gu (writing about A.D. 80) has occasion to illustrate the stinginess of a usurping emperor, Wang Mang, and enumerates his wealth as follows:

At this time [A.D. 23], in the inner apartments of the Wei-yang Palace, ten thousand catties of actual gold were put into one chest and there still remained sixty chests. In each office for storage of the Yellow Gate and of the Intendant of Palace Parks and in the workshops of the Master of Recipes, there were also several chests. The Imperial Treasury at the Ch'ang-lo Palace and the Bureau of Equalization and Standards in the capital in addition stored very much cash, silk, pearls, jade, and valuables.

Among the commodities which could profitably be shipped to the English plantations in America, a parcel of human beings was not the least remunerative. The colonists demanded labor, and were willing to pay for it. For a hundred years after the founding of Virginia this demand was met by the transportation and sale of white indentured servants recruited in Great Britain and Ireland, and so great was the volume of this business that the servants made up about three quarters of all immigrants coming to the colonies south of New York. During the eighteenth century their exclusive sway was gradually disputed by German redemptioners and Negro slaves, yet indentured servants continued to play a vital part in colonial life and to form an important element in colonial trade. The progenitor of many a proud American family found himself landed upon these shores not so much on account of his desire to seek freedom as because his person could be advantageously exchanged for a quantity of tobacco, lumber, or sassafras root.

Much labor has been spent upon the history of the cultivated and occupied lands of the medieval English village and the social life of its inhabitants, and as a result a fairly clear framework has been constructed into which alterations and additions may be fitted where necessary. This statement is not true of the great background of all early village life, of the activities concerned with the waste or unoccupied land lying outside fields and even village bounds, and either lying idle, or else used for pasture, estovers, and hunting. Modern students have been negligent of this side of the medieval countryside, being more engaged with the human interests of the village; and little allowance has been made for changes and developments occurring within decades or even centuries. The great history of common rights, an extremely important subject, has yet to be written. This paper has a few suggestions to make which might sometime be useful in a study of a very large field.

Since the beginning of the world-wide depression of the 1930's thewritings of J. M. Keynes have furnished the chief stimulus for serious discussion of economic policy and economic theory. There is implicit in the Keynesian position an interpretation of capitalism strikingly similar to that of P. J. Proudhon, the French socialist of the nineteenth century. Yet whatever similarities there are between the economic ideas of Keynes and Proudhon must be explained by time-separated reaction to more or less comparable problems. The only formal linkage between the two theorists would be their relations to Silvio Gesell, the stamped-money reformer. Keynes expresses admiration for the fundamentals of Gesell's work, and Gesell in turn avows himself a disciple of Proudhon. Keynes's agreement with Gesell is not confined to matters of technical theory, but extends also to the social premises of the work of that “strange, unduly neglected prophet…whose work contains flashes of deep insight and who only just failed to reach down to the essence of the matter.”He characterizes Gesell's work as “anti-Marxian socialism,” asserting that “the future will learn more from the spirit of Gesell than from that of Marx.” Since Marx made a bitter attack on Proudhon, and since Gesell declares himself a disciple of Proudhon, Keynes's references to the superiority of Gesell over Marx suggest important relations between Proudhon and Keynes.

The economic importance of the sanctuaries of antiquity has long JL been recognized. The Babylonian shrines were no exceptions; not only were the chief Mesopotamian temples religious centers, law courts, schools, and archive depositories, but they were also banks and mercantile establishments. Indeed, as fiscal institutions of the Babylonian economy, the importance of the sanctuaries cannot be overemphasized: “In financial or monetary transactions the position of the Babylonian temples was not unlike that of national banks; they carried on their business with all the added weight of official authority.”