Building was an event in seventeenth-century America. In 1637, a “schoale, or colledge,” for which the Massachusetts General Court had voted four hundred pounds the previous year, was “ordered to be at New Towne.” The next year, the name of New Towne was changed to Cambridge, and the “colledge was ordered to be called Harvard College.” Thirty-four years later, the first building was falling into disrepair. The towns of the colony were called upon to make an appropriation for a new one, “of brick and stone,” and the agency for building it was given to Deacon John Cooper and one William Manning.

The Byron Weston Company, paper manufacturers of Dalton, Massachusetts, have been using the historical route to publicity through a contest for the purpose of unearthing old American documents. The prize stories were collected into a book entitled “Dead Men Tell Unusual Tales,” and The Business Historical Society has been presented with a copy.

“The Industrial and Commercial Correspondence of Alexander Hamilton,” the first book published under the auspices of The Business Historical Society, incorporated, was sent to each member of the Society toward the last of February.

Probably few members of the present generation, who shudder at the inhumanity of the old laws allowing imprisonment for debt, realize that it is still allowable under the laws of certain states. In New York and Pennsylvania, for example, a man may be imprisoned for debt incurred by neglect or misconduct in any professional employment. In Nevada, he may lose his liberty for nonpayment of damages arising out of cases of fraud, libel and slander. And in Massachusetts, he may be sent to prison even for ordinary breach of contract if he owes as much as twenty dollars, exclusive of costs, and if his creditor can prove any one of six charges, among them, “that since the debt was contracted the debtor has hazarded or paid money or other property to the value of $100 or more in some kind of gaming prohibited by the law of the State.”