uilding of American railroads. Sec. 6. Reasons for
governmental aid. Sec. 7. Kinds of governmental aid. Sec. 8. Emergence of
the railroad problem. Sec. 9. Discrimination as to goods. Sec. 10. Local
discrimination. Sec. 11. Personal discrimination. Sec. 12. Economic power
of railroad managers. Sec. 13. Political power of railroad managers,
Sec. 14. Consolidation of railroads. Sec. 15. State railroad commissions. Sec. 16.
Passage of the Interstate Commerce Act. Sec. 17. Working of the Act.
Sec. 18. Public nature of the railroad franchise. Sec. 19. Other peculiar
privileges of railroads. Sec. 20. Private and public interests to be
harmonized.

Sec. 1. #Rise of the corporation concept#. In the legal systems of
primitive people and long afterward, only natural persons had legal
rights, could make contracts, have property, and carry on a business.
But in a number of cases, very early, groups of men came to have
certain interests in common and certain possessions. Gradually some
such groups gained more or less of legal recognition, with certain
political and economic rights as a body and not as individuals.
Thus evolved the conception of a "corporation" (body) having men as
"members," an artificial person, yet not the same as any one or as all
the individuals together, and legally distinct from the individuals.
A group of burghers obtaining a charter from the lord of the realm
became a municipal corporation; a group of teachers, a _collegium_,
became the corporation of the college or a university (a number of
persons united into one association); a group of craftsman became a
gild-corporation. Each corporation had certain rights, privileges, and
immunities, and used a corporate seal as a signature. All of the early
corporations had some economic features that were incidental to the
main purposes, which were political, ecclesiastical, educational,
and fraternal. Toward the end of the Middle Ages groups of traders
obtained charters to act as corporations permanently for business
purposes, such as foreign trade, colonization, and banking. These
increased in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in the
eighteenth century this form of organization was adopted also and
parliamentary charters obtained, by groups of men for building
turnpikes and canals and for carrying on other kinds of business.

Sec. 2. #The modern era of corporations#. The great era of the
corporations did not begin, however, until well