Edward Douglass White

“ A stockholder of a national bank, on his own behalf and of all others who might join, sued in a circuit court of the United States the directors of the bank, making the bank also a party defendant, to hold the directors liable for an act of alleged maladministration committed by them. The prayer was that the directors be decreed to pay back to the bank for the benefit of its stockholders the amount of money lost by the bank as the result of their misconduct. ”

“ There was no diversity of citizenship upon which the jurisdiction of the circuit court could rest, and therefore its power to entertain the case rested alone upon the fact that the defendant bank was a national banking association, that the other defendants were directors of such an association, and that the liability sought to be enforced arose from misconduct on their part in relation to their duties to the bank. ”

“ That the defendants, as directors and officers of the National Bank of Commerce, having also a large interest, direct or indirect, in another national bank known as the Fourth National Bank, had devised a scheme by which the National Bank of Commerce would buy out the Fourth National Bank for a sum utterly disproportionate to the value of the property and rights to be transferred, thus despoiling the National Bank of Commerce and its stockholders and wrongfully enriching the Fourth National Bank and its stockholders to the extent of the inordinate price which was paid. ”