n allows a majority to determine such
questions of discretion as whether the note of A or of B shall be
discounted; whether notes shall be discounted on one, two, or six days
in the week; how many hours in a day their banking-house shall be kept
open; how many clerks shall be employed; what salaries they shall
receive, and such like matters, which are in their nature mere subjects
of discretion, and where there are no natural presumptions of justice or
right in favor of one course over the other. But no banking corporation
allows a majority, or any other number of its members less than the
whole, to divert the funds of the corporation to any other purpose than
the one to which _every member_ of the corporation has legally agreed
that they may be devoted; nor to take the stock of one member and give
it to another; nor to distribute the dividends among the stockholders
otherwise than to each one the proportion which he has agreed to accept,
and all the others have agreed that he shall receive. Nor does any
banking corporation allow a majority to impose taxes upon the members
for the payment of the corporate expenses, except in such proportions as
_every member_ has consented that they may be imposed. All these
questions, involving the _rights_ of the members as against each other,
are fixed by the articles of the association,--that is, by the agreement
to which _every member_ has personally assented.

What is also specially to be noticed, and what constitutes a vital
difference between the banking corporation and the political
corporation, or government, is, that in case of controversy among the
members of the banking corporation, as to the _rights_ of any member,
the question is determined, not by any number, either majority, or
minority, of the corporation itself, _but by persons out of the
corporation_; by twelve men acting as jurors, or by other tribunals of
justice, of which no member of the corporation is allowed to be a part.
But in the case of the political corporation, controversies among the
parties to it, as to the rights of individual members, must of necessity
be settled by members of the corporation itself, because there are no
persons out of the corporation to whom the question can be referred.

Since, then, all questions as to the _rights_ of the members of the
political corporation, must be determined by members of the corporation
itself, the trial by jury says that no man's _rights_,--neither his
right