As the oil industry grew, comfortable family firms, hitherto untouched by the ferocities of competition, found their position under attack and their independence menaced. The painful, inexorable process of substituting a new economic order for an old is here detailed from the viewpoint and records of one of the dispossessed.

Having solved the initial problems of raising capital for its steamship venture on the Yangtze (Business History Review, June, 1954), the Boston trading firm of Russell & Co. then faced operational difficulties of a formidable nature. Fluctuating local trade, recurrent scarcity of working capital, and the presence of an outnumbering fleet of competing vessels provided a severe test of the resident-partner system of administration. Russell & Co.'s Far Eastern affiliate rode out the lean years, profited handsomely in the fat years that followed, and then liquidated its investment. This account of the Yangtze steamship venture further illuminates the methods and policies of American commission houses in the nineteenth-century China trade and has implications of interest to modern managers of foreign investments.

As a challenge for further research and analysis, Professor Kirchner suggests some of the cultural differences encountered by Western businessmen in Russia which significantly shaped their conduct of trade.

The following article served to introduce the first issue of Tradition, a German journal of business history, in October, 1956. It constitutes a review of business history generally, with particular reference to progress and ideas in Germany, notes of efforts in other Continental countries, and comparative references to American progress. Guideposts are set up both for the journal and for scholars active in the field. These illustrate certain unique problems facing German historians, but at the same time emphasize the existence of broad agreement among business historians on basic goals and operating methods. Reprinted in translation through the courtesy of Tradition and of Professor Wilhelm Treue, Editor.

The practice of giving advice to employees is probably as old as the employer-employee relationship itself, but personnel counseling has become institutionalized over the past half-century and provides an example of the emergence of a specialized staff function.