BUSINESS
Within the limits of this space anything like an adequate reference to the source books of fact and thought is impossible. All that may be attempted is to suggest an arbitrary way through the whole of the subject—a thoroughfare from which the reader may take off where he will as his own interests develop. For the foundations of an economic understanding one needs only to read “Principles of Political Economy,” by Simon Newcomb, the American astronomer, who in a mood of intellectual irritation inclined his mind to this mundane matter and produced the finest book of its kind in the world. For the rough physiognomy of American economic phenomena there is “A Century of Population Growth,” Bureau of the Census, 1909, a splendid document prepared under the direction of S. N. D. North. Katharine Coman’s “Industrial History of the United States” is an important work in itself and contains, besides, an excellent and full bibliography. “Crises and Depressions” and “Corporations and the State,” by Theodore E. Burton; “Forty Years of American Finance,” by Alexander D. Noyes; “Railroad Transportation, Its History and Its Laws,” by A. T. Hadley; “Trusts, Pools and Corporations,” by Wm. Z. Ripley; and “The Book of Wheat,” by Peter Tracy Dondlinger, are books in which the separate phases indicated by title are essentially treated. For dissertation, interpretation, and universal thought every student will find himself deeply indebted to “Trade Morals, Their Origin, Growth and Province,” by Edward D. Page; “The Economic Interpretation of History,” by James E. Thorold Rogers; “History of the New World Called America,” by E. J. Payne; “Economic Studies,” by Walter Bagehot; “Essays in Finance,” by R. Giffen; “Recent Economic Changes,” by David A. Wells, and “The Challenge of Facts and Other Essays,” by William Graham Sumner.
G. G.