The power of history to instruct policy makers and enforcers is demonstrated in this study of the seventy-five-year effort to control pollution by the petroleum industry of the upper Texas Gulf coast. Dividing his subject into three time periods, Professor Pratt shows that the goal of economic growth, even with highly inefficient and polluting production methods, ruled until about 1914; from 1914 to 1940, progress in pollution control resulted primarily from less wasteful refining technology; and in the most recent era pollution, having become critical, is finally being controlled insofar as industry cooperation and national regulation can achieve it. But, he warns, the problem has now attained international proportions, and he asks where the social institutions to effect regulation are to be found on that plane.

The corporate charter, so restricted in its use in England, found a constantly broadening range of applications in America from the colonial period onward. The test of importance to the general welfare, originally confined to municipal, benevolent, or at most public-utility enterprises, was being applied to manufacturing ventures by the second decade of the nineteenth century.

Notwithstanding the importance of maintaining soundness, commercial banks in early ante-bellum America still strove to maximize profits, according to Professor Adams, who cites Stephen Girard's conservative private bank as an example. Using internal data from Girard's bank, of the kind that is seldom available for banks, he shows that a flexible policy of shifting from government and quasi-government securities, as they became scarcer, to business debt, both long- and short-term, kept bank profits from declining. So long as Girard lived, his bank remained fully competitive with the growing number of chartered institutions.