ission at
Washington and one of the commissioners appointed to draw the present
business corporation law of Massachusetts. In both such capacities he
had the advantage of hearing the expert opinions of many witnesses.
There were two, and only two, broad theories of legislation about
private business corporations: One view, the older view, that they
should be carefully limited and regulated by the State at every point,
and that their solvency, or at least the intrinsic value of their
capital stock, should, as far as possible, be guaranteed by
legislation, to the public as well as to their creditors and
stockholders; and that for any fraud, or even defect of organization,
the stockholders, or at least the directors, should be liable. On the
other hand, the modern view, that it was no business of the public to
protect investors, or even creditors, and that the corporations should
be given as free a hand as possible, with no limitation as to their
size, the nature of business they are to transact, or the payment
in of their capital stock. This is the corporation problem. The
State-and-Federal problem may be called that other difficulty which
arises from the clashing jurisdictions of the States among themselves
and with the Federal government, their laws and their courts, as to
the corporations now created, particularly railroads and corporations
"engaged in interstate commerce" which may include all the "trusts,"
if the mere fact that they do business in many States makes them so.

Suppose you had a world where one man in every ten was gifted with
immortality and with the right not to be answerable for anything that
he did. You can easily see that the structure of society, at least
as to property, labor, and business affairs, would be very decidedly
altered. Yet this is what really happened with the invention of the
modern corporation; only we have got completely used to it. It would
be possible to have got on without any business corporations at all.
Striking as this may seem at first thought, one must remember that the
world got on very well without corporations for thousands of years,
and that it was by a mere historical accident and a modern invention
that the two great attributes of the corporation, immortality and
personal irresponsibility, were brought about. All business might
still be conducted, as it was in the Middle Ages, by individual men
or by partnerships, and still we should have had very great single
fortu