te, be incapable of any
concerted action to defend the income they draw from society against any
resolute attack. Such crude and obvious denials of the essential
principles of their existence as the various Socialistic bodies have
proclaimed have, no doubt, encountered a vast, unorganized, negative
opposition from them, but the subtle and varied attack of natural forces
they have neither the collective intelligence to recognize, nor the
natural organization to resist. The shareholding body is altogether too
chaotic and diffused for positive defence. And the question of the
prolonged existence of this comparatively new social phenomenon, either
in its present or some modified form, turns, therefore, entirely on the
quasi-natural laws of the social body. If they favour it, it will
survive; when they do not, it will vanish as the mists of the morning
before the sun.

Neglecting a few exceptional older corporations which, indeed, in their
essence are not usurious, but of unlimited liability, the shareholding
body appeared first, in its present character, in the seventeenth
century, and came to its full development in the mid-nineteenth. Was its
appearance then due only to the attainment of a certain necessary degree
of public credit, or was it correlated with any other force? It seems in
accordance with facts to relate it to another force, the development of
mechanism, so far as certain representative aspects go. Hitherto the
only borrower had been the farmer, then the exploring trader had found a
world too wide for purely individual effort, and then suddenly the
craftsmen of all sorts and the carriers discovered the need of the new,
great, wholesale, initially expensive appliances that invention was
offering them. It was the development of mechanism that created the
great bulk of modern shareholding, it took its present shape
distinctively only with the appearance of the railways. The hitherto
necessary but subordinate craftsman and merchant classes were to have
new weapons, new powers, they were to develop to a new importance, to a
preponderance even in the social body. But before they could attain
these weapons, before this new and novel wealth could be set up, it had
to pay its footing in an apportioned world, it had to buy its right to
disturb the established social order. The dividend of the shareholder
was the tribute the new enterprise had to pay the old wealth. The share
was the manumission money of machinery. And