A study of the career of Ignaz Jastrow, guiding spirit of the Berlin Handelshochschule, invites attention to the broader subject of academic education for business. There was a close relationship between the educational philosophy embodied in the founding of the Berlin school in 1906 and in that of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration in 1908. This relationship was not accidental, and establishment of these two institutions constituted a decisive point in a long history, beginning in the eighteenth century. Over the years, the basic difficulty had been that of endeavoring to raise professional training for business above the secondary school level. In those instances during the nineteenth century where university-level training was attempted, the result was overemphasis on the general background of business. In 1900, despite the many promising experiments in European countries and America, a sound foundation for high-level business training was still lacking. Jastrow's Handelshochschule was the first institution that focused on the real world of business and at the same time was truly academic in nature. This same combination was also effected at Harvard, where the basic objectives were implemented by reformed teaching techniques and by a continuing program of research upon business subjects.

The story of George Gunton is that of an astonishingly accurate economic prophet whose viewpoints have found wide acceptance a half-century after they were enunciated. Gunton is shown in this article not as a paid defender of big business but as an apostle of compromise, standing in the No Man's Land of a vast battleground. With equal fervor Gunton declared, “It is our industries that make us great,” but that laborers' wages were “as elastic as human wants … capable of as much expansion as the social character of man.” His numerous commentaries are a lucid clue to the relative importance of contemporary issues, and those commentaries are enhanced by Gunton's instinctive sense of history. Out of the confusion of contradictory evidence recorded at the Chicago Conference on Trusts, before the Industrial Commission, and elsewhere on the business and political stage Gunton framed his thesis of the essential interdependence of big business and organized labor. His convictions were, in total, unique, and his judgment and reconciliation of conflicting viewpoints have meaning and utility today.

Compared with the great inter-regional networks, the Eastern Railroad did not loom large. Its creation, however, is an integral part of New England history and well worthy of inclusion in any first chapter of American railroading history. The development pattern is one of piece-meal extension from several population centers, the linking of the segments, and the proliferation of branch lines. External difficulties took the shape of competition from stage and boat lines, and the rivalry of the fledgling Boston & Maine. Internally, the chief problems revolved around establishment of an effective management organization and the maintenance of adequate financial controls. Threading a populous route from Boston to Portland, Eastern's future seemed bright. Yet, in a faint foreshadowing of events of a far later day, main-line profits were swallowed up by operation of branch connections built or acquired with more enthusiasm than foresight and, once acquired, not easily disowned.

The vital task of measuring jobs in order to establish equitable incentive wage rates is usually accomplished by a combination of techniques involving both time and motion studies. Yet for many years a highly personal competition between leading exponents of each type of study prevented a union of techniques from taking place. In the early days of the scientific management movement, Frank Gilbreth was a fierce admirer of Frederick W. Taylor, but Taylor and his disciples rejected Gilbreth, whose micromotion techniques came into competition with the Taylorites' stop watches. Thereby scientific management was split into two antagonistic camps and the course of the movement decisively influenced.

Even in laissez-faire days there was a “corporate conscience,” well defined and with active, if limited, manifestations. Over the course of years not only criticism but changing social forces and modifications of the economic system itself exerted a broadening influence on the attitude of American business toward its public responsibilities.

In the 1890–1907 period Populist-Progressive protests, public ignorance of the economic functions involved, and obvious abuses in the performance of those functions combined to produce a major peak of adverse opinion. Public protest shaped the course of stock exchange history through subsequent decades and yielded operator prototypes that have become classic Americana.