At a time when American shipping generally was finding it difficult to compete in international trade, certain American shipping groups were profiting largely. The strength of the American-Hawaiian Steamship Company derived from conservative financial policy, bold but not reckless expansion, astute analysis of trading opportunities, skillful handling of competition, and decisive adaptation to emergencies. A closely knit group of owner-managers held the reins of control. Internal strength permitted optimum realizations from a favorable commercial environment and even helped to make that environment favorable.

Generalizations about the merger movement in America at the turn of the century have too open been predicated upon inadequate information about the motives and mechanisms involved and the results achieved. This has been particularly true of those combinations in which the firm of J. P. Morgan & Company was involved. The International Mercantile Marine Company merger of 1902 has hitherto been misrepresented as a promotion of Wall Street. The subsequent course of this venture shows how even a combination of the world's most astute bankers and shipping men could be misled in analysis and held powerless to affect their own destiny by the march of economic and political events. Not all the grand combinations of the early twentieth century yielded lush promotional profits; neither should the evidence of overcapitalization in such combinations always be accepted at face value.

A half century ago the conflict over state regulation of railroads was the chief issue in Alabama politics. Two staunch advocates led the rival forces. Both leaders were in agreement on the need to develop the industrial capacities of the state, but each sponsored violently opposing concepts of how this could best be done. The present article, by presenting the two sides of the Alabama controversy, provides us with insights into the national dilemma over government regulation of business which developed after the Civil War.

When American railroad promoters, in the years immediately after 1830, had to look beyond their own regions for capital, they turned first to Broad Street in Philadelphia, where Nicholas Biddle and his associates served as the agents for marketing vast amounts of sterling bonds in London. This mechanism was disrupted by the failure of the Bank of the United States of Pennsylvania in 1841. Then State Street in Boston became the center, and common stock became the chief instrument, of American railroad finance. The sharp recession of 1847 showed that the Boston capitalists had already made long-term investments in excess of the liquid capital available to them. New York merchants, bankers, and brokers now took up the task of financing the railroads of the South and West, and Wall Street became the undisputed financial center of the country.

The decision of the U. S. Supreme Court in the Cement Institute case (1948) had the effect of outfowing the system of basing point pricing used in the steel industry. But until 1953 the decision had relatively little effect on steel price competition because a strong sellers' market prevailed. In the future, as idle capacity continues, steel executives almost certainly will evolve a new method of securing uniform delivered prices. This objective for pricing policy is dictated by two broad sets of factors: the organizational structure of the industry (fewness of firms, an undifferentiated product, and inelastic demand), and the geographical distribution of the phnts of the largest producers. This article analyzes the multiple basing point system used up to 1948, the temporary expedients employed from 1948 to 1954, and the probable pricing policies of the future.

The development of the administration of business firms has been studied by many scholars in the last 25 years. By comparison, the history of the administration of trade unions is an untouched field; most historians of the American labor movement have dealt only summarily with administrative changes. But efficient internal organization was crucial, in the years after 1873, to trade union survival and growth. Under the prodding of Samuel Gompers, the Cigarmakers' International Union pioneered several improvements. Its major innovations were: centralized control, especially of strikes; benefit payments for sickness, unemployment, and death; high dues and high initiation fees.