In 1947 and 1949 statutory monopolies were established over the export of all major agricultural products from British West Africa. This device was justified chiefly on the ground that it would serve to stabilize the incomes of the peasant producers. This justification is not supported either by economic analysis or by history. The statutory monopolies seem rather to have emerged from a confluence of events and opinions in the preceding decade: the widespread belief that middlemen are socially unproductive, the search by the members of a trade association for some way to restrict competition and safeguard their profits, the formation of export control boards as a wartime measure and the resultant creation of influential administrative positions, the predilection of the administrators for tidiness, the recent emphasis on compulsory saving as an instrument for development of backward areas and the opinion that socialization of peasant saving would contribute to that development.

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.

In 1906, nine important lumber firms set up a jointly owned company to sell their cut-over lands in northwestern Wisconsin to potential farmers. The land company learned, from its experience with various classes of buyers, that the most reliable was the owner-occupant who had made a substantial down payment. Even when a settler fell behind in his payments, the company did not foreclose unless the debtor left his land or was obviously making no effort to pay. Competition from other land companies tended to lower the price of land and also to inflate sales costs, but at its dissolution in 1940 the company showed a moderate profit. Thus the policy adopted by the nine lumber firms, of holding the cut-overs for sale to settlers rather than letting the land revert to the state for taxes, found a commercial justification.

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 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.