Body corporate

“ As they have emanated from the supreme power of this kingdom, the whole body and the whole train of their servants, the corporate body as a corporate body, individuals as individuals, are responsible to the high justice of this kingdom. ”

“ The typical business corporation of the last century, owned by a small group of individuals, managed by their owners, and limited in size by their personal wealth, is being supplanted by huge concerns in which the lives of tens or hundreds of thousands of employees and the property of tens or hundreds of thousands of investors are subjected, through the corporate mechanism, to the control of a few men. ”

“ Perversions of the System caused by the Action of Corporations in their Entirety.—More directly within the domain of pure economics is the relation between the typical great corporation and the majority of the public which is wholly outside of it. In the common mind this relation also often appears as that of plunderers and plundered, and what it often has actually been, is a relation between corporations which have exacted a certain tribute and a body of consumers which has had to pay the tribute. ”

“ In the earlier periods of the large corporation the industrial baron and his ofttimes lawless audacity were essentials of corporate existence. As these great types die off, their system dies with them. Supply keeps close on the heels of demand. These feudal barons of industry and commerce are breeding no successors because none are needed. ”

“ Everybody but the corporation knows the house of the Nine Nations, a haunt for wasted prostitutes, assassins, burglars, thieves—every grade of criminals known to depraved nature. The corporation would seem either to have a charming sympathy for it, or to look upon it with that good-natured indifference so happily illustrated while eating its oysters and drinking its whiskey. An empty-headed corporation is sure always to have its hands very full, which is the case with yours at this moment. ”

“ Indeed, something very worth while largely disappeared from our national life when the once prevalent familial system of conducting manufacturing and mercantile enterprises went out and was replaced by the highly impersonal corporate system for doing business. ”

“ The great carrying trade by land is governed by substantially the same principle; being in the hands of corporate associations, whose members are not personally liable for acts of the employees, but risk only the amount of their capital stock in the corporation. ”

“ The philosophy of our times, I think, requires that such enterprises be held to a higher standard than that of the 'morals of the market-place' which exalts a single-minded, myopic determination to maximize profits as the traditional be-all and end-all of corporate concern. ”

“ Although the value of this instrumentality in commerce and industry was fully recognized, incorporation for business was commonly denied long after it had been freely granted for religious, educational, and charitable purposes. [2] by corporations. So at first the corporate of encroachment upon the liberties and opportunities of the individual. Fear of the subjection of labor to capital. Fear of monopoly. Fear that the absorption of capital by corporations, and their perpetual life, might bring evils similar to those which attended mortmain. ”

“ If you are logical, you will admit that no man or woman who owns stock in a modern corporation is, according to your definition, Christian, and, to use your own phrase, can enter the Kingdom of God. I can tell you, as one who knows, that there is no corporation in this country which, in the struggle to maintain itself, is not forced to adopt the natural law of the survival of the fittest, which you condemn. Your own salary, while you had it, came from men who had made the money in corporations. Business is business, and admits of no sentimental considerations. ”

“ While the means of production are thus ceasing to be in the strict sense private property, and require for their actual operation a collective body of laborers, while the product is becoming a social product, the owners of the means of production and the products, are becoming shareholders, and thus ceasing to perform any useful function, to have any real utility. The success of a business in former times depended upon the energy and skill of its proprietor, just as it sometimes does to-day in small manufacturing or mercantile establishments. ”

“ The corporation keeps its eyes in its belly, its little sense in its big boots, and its dull action in the whiskey-jug. Like Mrs. Swiggs, it cannot afford to do anything for this heathen world in the heart of home. No, sir! The corporation has the most delicate sense of its duties. It is well paid to nurture the nucleus of a pestilence that may some day break out and sweep over the city like an avenging enemy. It thanks kind Providence, eating oysters and making Presidents the while, for averting the dire scourge it encourages with its apathy. ”

“ The legal fiction of a soulless corporation is the expression of a biting social fact. The corporation has no soul. It has no heart. It is only a brain and a muscular, grasping hand.
And so it is that in dealing with employés and in dealing with the public our corporations are in fact too often a tyranny remorseless as that against which our fathers rebelled in 1776. ”

“ A further aggravating feature of this problem is the increasing tendency of capital to associated action. What little knowledge of his employees or sympathy with them the individual manufacturer might have is wholly lost in the case of the corporation. To the stockholders of a great joint-stock company, many of whom are never on the spot, the hundreds of laborers employed by the company are simply "hands"—as to whose possession of hearts or minds or souls the by-laws rarely take cognizance. ”

“ And, as ownership of the shares is becoming continually more dispersed, the power which formerly accompanied ownership is becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few. The changes thereby wrought in the lives of the workers, of the owners and of the general public, are so fundamental and far-reaching as to lead these scholars to compare the evolving 'corporate system' with the feudal system ”

“ If elements of self-perpetuation are prime essentials of good organization, the Pharisee family are certainly entitled to bid in the preferred runs.
The corporation was evolved to supply a demand of society. Life, property, material, moral and spiritual welfare could not be left to depend upon the uncertain earthly existence of the leader or trustee. So, both rationally and empirically, by reason and by costly experiment, came the corporation to beat Death at his own game. ”

“ It appears that the characteristic energy of every state consists in the reciprocal influence upon each other of the corporate whole, and the constituent elements, in respect of certain definitely assignable classes of human action. These classes of action will either have reference to things or physical substances, as objects of ownership or use, or have no such reference. The actually subsisting relationship to each other of the corporate whole, and the constituent personal elements, depends upon the form of government which casually happens to prevail. ”

“ 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. ”

“ John Graham Brooks, takes up and discusses through nearly four hundred pages the economic significance of the social questions of the hour, the master passions at work among us, men versus machinery, and the solution of our present ills in a better concurrence than at present exists—an organization whereby every advantage of cheaper service and cheaper product shall go direct to the whole body of the people.... ”

“ Moreover, when they understand the mechanism of production and exchange better, when they know exactly what conditions obtain in manufacture generally and in their industry in particular, what its markets are, what capital is invested in it and how much more capital could be profitably employed in its development, then these men, free, organised, and well educated as they will be, will by the very nature of things begin to be admitted as members of the boards of directors of the great corporations, and afterwards, little by little, to the management of ordinary business concerns. ”

“ The Corporation has always taken a keen interest in matters affecting conditions of labor. It has lent its influence, its money, and the time of its officials to better these conditions, to provide more attractive homes and more sanitary and healthful conditions for its men, better educational facilities for their children, and wholesome amusement for all. For itself, the big company expects the benefit from the resultant increased efficiency and loyalty. For the worker, the most important gain is added self-respect. ”

“ He points out that "one limb of the body politic is drawing away the nourishment from the other," and that "the poor laws seem only to encourage vice and sloth in the nation." He proposes the formation of a corporation with a capital of £300,000 for employing the poor. ”

“ These two great bodies will indeed work in unison, the Company depending on the moral direction and support of the Society, the Society again acting only with the material assistance of the Company. For example, in the management of the clothing industry, the quantity produced will at first be kept down so as to preserve an equilibrium between supply and demand; and wherever the Company undertakes the organization of new industries the same precautions will be exercised.
But individual enterprise must never be checked by our superior force. ”

“ Their health will then have every chance of being good, and health is labor. The association will buy wholesale, and at the manufacturing price (still upon my security, secured to me by their wages) , warm, good, strong materials, which a portion of the workmen's wives will be able to make into clothes as well as any tailor. Finally, the consumption of caps and shoes being considerable, the association will obtain them at a great reduction in price.' Well, Mdlle. Angela! what do you say to our speculator? ”

“ When General Ward had finished reading, he lifted up his glasses and said: "Well, that's it, boys; John has come to his turn of the road. Here's the rest. It says: 'The corporation in question is practically controlled by one man, the man who has placed the information above mentioned in the hands of the government. It is a corporation owning no physical property whatever, and is organized as a rebate hopper, if one may so style it. ”

“ The trite saying that corporations have no souls can be applied with equal propriety to a body of individuals at a social function, where the bored look on their faces shows that they have failed to find a subject of general interest, and are in consequence suffering in durance vile. ”

“ The corporation was declared a scheme of oppression, a hungry octopus, a grinder of the individual. And to prove the case various instances of hardship were cited; and no doubt there was much suffering, for many people are never able to adjust themselves to new conditions without experiencing pain and regret.
But we now believe that corporations came because they were required. Certain things the times demanded, and no one man, or two or three men could perform these tasks alone—hence the corporation. The rise of England as a manufacturing nation began with the plan of the stock company. ”

“ If in the conduct of industry, therefore, the manager ever keeps in mind that in dealing with employees he is dealing with human beings, with flesh and blood, [Pg 39] with hearts and souls; and if, likewise, the workmen realize that managers and investors are themselves also human beings, how much bitterness will be avoided!
Are the interests of these human beings with labor to sell and with capital to employ necessarily antagonistic or necessarily mutual? ”

“ They enable a corporation to manage its own affairs, and to hold property, without the perplexing intricacies, the hazardous and endless necessity, of perpetual conveyances for the purpose of transmitting it from hand to hand. It is chiefly for the purpose of clothing bodies of men, in succession, with these qualities and capacities, that corporations were invented, and are in use. By these means, a perpetual succession of individuals are capable of acting for the promotion of the particular object, like one immortal being. ”

“ In turn, it bore fruit in miseries and horrors multiplied for millions, like those of the child lacemakers of Mid-Victorian England, who were dragged from their beds at two or three o'clock in the morning to work until ten or eleven at night in the services of a stock company.
A corporation is said to have no soul. ”

“ The management of the big company realized that the workers’ rights to a decent life were fully as important as the rights of capital, and that more, both in mental satisfaction and in profit, was to be gained from a recognition of these rights than from their denial. Perhaps, too, it saw that sooner or later the day would dawn when the worker with his hands would demand fair treatment, and it had the foresight and the courage to hasten the dawn of that day. ”

“ The American corporation problem will never be understood in its proper relations and full consequences until it is conceived as a sort of an advanced attack on the breastworks of our national economic system by this essential problem of the distribution of wealth. ”

“ This fact is to some extent obscured from us by the elaborate development of commercial organisation, so that multitudes of men are engaged in enterprises and vocations apparently so removed from the actual business of clothing, feeding and housing other men that they are not aware of being connected with it at all. Yet the entire structure of commerce rests upon the requirement that certain primary physical needs of men must be met. That men shall be fed, clothed, sheltered, provided with heat and light,—here is the source of commerce. ”