HISTORICAL POTPOURRI

—”History was always male history, and literature was male litera¬ture. It will help women to get a fair share of the pie in society to become professionals by virtue of education.” Professor Domna C. Stanton, quoted in The Tuscaloosa News, “What People are Saying,” May 25, 1975.

—”Now,of course, the most nutritious food you can eat is meat. It makes for stronger bodies. In the whole history of the world, whenever a meat-eating race has gone to war against a non-meat-eating race, the meat eaters won. It produces superior people. We have the books of history.” Senator Carl Curtis, “Notable and Quotable,” The Wall Street Journal, October 7, 1976, p. 24.

—”According to social historians, the nation’s first pay toilet was installed in Terre Haute, Ind,, for the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1910. Passengers arriving at the Terre Haute depot would rush to its modern restrooms—only to find them occupied by curious natives entranced by the novelty of indoor plumbing. Beseiged by complaints from the train-riding public, railroad officials put pay locks on the restroom doors, Thereafter, the stationmaster would unlock the doors for the convenience of passengers on incoming trains. But if a native turned up to use the facilities, he had to pay a nickel.” Quoted in Newsweek, “Justice,” August 18, 1975.

“The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it. When we resist, therefore, the con¬centration of power, we are resisting the processes of death, because concentration of power is what always precedes the destruction of human liberties.” Woodrow Wilson, quoted in The Sunday Chronicle-Herald, Augusta, Georgia, Section 2D, March 5,1972.

“The student of history must avoid that error which the proverb calls measuring other people’s corn by one’s own bushel.” Notes from the Foundation for Economic Education, March 1976, p. 1,

“The stuff of history is not opinions but sources.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn, [title of publication omitted in original], August 1914, p. 630.
“I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging the future but by the past,” Patrick Henry, Phi Kappa Phi Journal, Spring 1976, p. 55.

(Vol. 3, No. 2, p. 2, 1976)

—”Some of [the] . . . planning imperfections—which would con-ceivably have led to business failure later in the century—might have been remedied had the early industralists developed ac¬curate accounting techniques. These could have served as a guide to costing, but even one of the more talented and efficient entre¬preneurs, George Lee—responsible for the building and equip¬ping of the Salford Twist Mill—was forced to admit to James Watt, Jr., that his production techniques had outrun his knowledge of ‘keeping manufacturing Books—in the construction of ma¬chinery we never could reduce it to regular piece work or divide the labour of Making and Repairing it in such a manner as to determine the distinct cost of each’ [135:27, 39]. And with a few exceptions, notably Josiah Wedgwood or Boulton and Watt, these plaintive words probably represent the unspoken views of the vast majority of entrepreneurs in all branches of economic activity. Pollard’s explanation of the failure to develop to any con¬siderable extent the use of accounts on guiding management decisions is significant: ‘. . . the problem calling for a solution was not widely or continuously felt. . . . Apart from certain crisis years, anyone with a better technique had no problem in selling, and new techniques were so obviously “better” that it did not need elaborate accounts to prove them. . . . [129:248]. This ver dict almost certainty has a wider application.

“These remarks are not intended to belittle the achievements of the entrepreneurs of the Industrial Revolution. Their object is twofold: to emphasize the need for more detailed
comparative in¬vestigations of the responses of entrepreneurs to the difficultie s that confronted them in the context of the overall economic en-vironment within which they operated; and to suggest that the names that have become famous (Arkwright, Oldknow, Strutt, Peel, Owen, M’Connel and Kennedy, Gott and Marshall in textiles; Crawshay; Lloyd, Reynolds, Roebuck, Walker, Wilkinson, Boulton, Watt, Bramah, Maudslay in iron and engineering; Minton, Spode, Wedgwood in pottery; Dundonald, Garbett, Keir, Macintosh, Ten-nant in chemicals; Whitbread, Thrale, Truman in brewing) were not typical entrepreneurs.”

(Quoting Peter L. Payne, British Entrepreneurship in the Nine¬teenth Century, pp. 32-33, MacMillan: London, 1964).

“The earliest accounting aid used by man is the notched stick— the use of which goes back perhaps 7,000 years to neolithic days. A somewhat more elaborate version of the notched stick was developed in England and called the wooden ‘tally’—a narrow piece of wood about 8 or 9 inches in length which served as a receipt. The amounts were recorded by a system of notches cut on the edge of it—each width representing a denomination (a cut the width of the palm was L1000, one the size of the thumb L100, L20 the width of the little finger, L1 the thickness of a grain of barley). From about the 12th century, this was used by the British Court of Exchequer (the Treasury) as its documentary receipts. It did not go out of use until 1826—about 700 years later.

The interesting sequel was still to follow, however. By a decree of William IV, all the tallies (700 years’ accumulation) were ordered destroyed. In 1834 they were thrown into the heating stoves of the House of Commons. They burned so efficiently that the Parlia-ment Buildings caught fire and were razed to the ground! I have often wondered whether there were not some symbolic connec¬tion between the adoption of rational accounts and the burning of Congressional buildings.”

(Quoting S. K. Roxas, SGV Journal, Manila, No. 1, 1975, p. 20).
(Vol. 3, No. 4, p. 8, 1976)