Taking issue with such earlier theorists as Schumpeter, who believed that the rise of bureaucratic structures would stifle the innovative process that lies at the heart of capitalism and thus lead on to socialism, Professor Livesay discusses the careers of three innovative leaders who used the bureaucratic form of organization to keep innovation alive and to realize its implications. He argues that with shrewd leaders like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford II (and less well-known ones like Howard Stoddard) at the helm, bureaucratic organizations have been the mechanism of highly dynamic policies rather than the agency of socialistic stasis.

As a personnel policy that would assure the country's rapidly expanding railroad system the best grade of employees, centralization of discharge data within a company and interchange of such data between companies struck some executives as a useful practice. Others disagreed and, as Professor Black shows, their wisdom prevailed. The problem centered upon reliability of such key operating employees as brakemen and conductors, and responded better to institution of controls that would minimize the two most important misfeasances: drinking on the job and petty embezzlement.

Taking a fresh look at the factors bearing on profitability of carrying coal from Newcastle to London in the eighteenth century, Professor Hausman finds that average ship loads rose and technology improved during the period. He notes that this is consistent with Adam Smith's dictum that England's effort to monopolize the colonial carrying trade, through the Navigation Acts, would divert capital from domestic to colonial shipping, thereby raising rates of return in the former and lowering them in the latter.

That restrictions on real-estate-mortgage lending by banks chartered under the National Banking Act of 1864 seriously restricted availability of long-term financing before 1913, has long been accepted. Professors Keehn and Smiley explain some ways in which resourceful national banks could circumvent this restriction. They find that lending within the letter but outside the spirit of the Act of 1864 was greater than published figures on direct lending indicate.