exception is, however, of the utmost importance. For another generation
or two any solution of the problem of corporation control, and of all
the other critical problems connected therewith, will be complicated,
confused, and delayed by the inter-state commerce clause, and by the
impossibility, under that clause, of the exercise of any really
effective responsibility and power by the central government. The
distinction between domestic and inter-state commerce which is implied
by the Constitutional distribution of powers is a distinction of
insignificant economic or industrial importance; and its necessary legal
enforcement makes the carrying out of an efficient national industrial
policy almost impossible.

Under the inter-state commerce clause, a corporation conducting, as all
large companies do, both a state and an inter-state business, is
subject to several supplementary jurisdictions. It is subject, of
course, primarily to the laws of the state under which it is organized,
and to the laws of the same state regulating its own particular form of
industrial operation. It is subject, also, to any conditions which the
legislatures of other states may wish to impose upon its business,--in
so far as that business is transacted within their jurisdictions.
Finally, it is subject to any regulation which the central government
may impose upon its inter-state transactions. From the standpoint of
legal supervision, consequently, the affairs of such a corporation are
divided into a series of compartments, each compartment being determined
by certain arbitrary geographical lines--lines which do not, like the
boundaries of a municipality, correspond to any significant economic
division. As long as such a method of supervision endures, no effective
regulation of commerce or industry is possible. A corporation is not a
commercial Pooh-Bah, divided into unrelated sections. It is an
industrial and commercial individual. The business which it transacts in
one state is vitally related to the business which it transacts in other
states; and even in those rare cases of the restriction of a business to
the limits of a single state, the purchasing and selling made in its
interest necessarily compete with inter-state transactions in the same
products. Thus the Constitutional distinction between state and
inter-state commerce is irrelevant to the real facts of American
industry and trade.

In the past the large corporations have, on the whol