Horace Gray

“ One important object of congress, in requiring the fitness of each corporation for carrying on business, with safety to its stockholders and to all persons dealing with it, to be ascertained and certified by a public officer before the corporation should have power to transact any business whatever, except to complete its organization as a corporation, doubtless was to create and maintain public confidence in the new system of national banks established by congress to take the place of the local banks to which the people had been accustomed. ”

“ To take a lease is certainly to 'transact business,' within the meaning of the statute; and a lease for a term of years, at a large rent, of offices to be occupied by the bank 'as a banking office, and for no other purpose,' however necessary it might be for the transacting, or even for the commencing, of banking business by a corporation whose organization had been completed, and which had been lawfully authorized to commence the business of banking, is in no sense incidental or necessarily preliminary to the organization of the corporation. ”

“ Congress, indeed, in establishing the system of national banks, instead of undertaking to grant special charters of incorporation upon its own judgment of the expediency of doing so in each case, has allowed corporations to be organized by voluntary acts of the associates, under the general conditions defined in the statute. ”