Trust company

“ The trust company is in a position to render valuable, and often indispensable, aid to its corporate clients. Large amounts being involved, the great railroad and industrial corporations are willing to pay well for such services. Corporate trust business has, consequently, been a profitable field for the trust companies. ”

“ Least of all did I approve of the 'business basis,' and I looked very much askance indeed at the 'Scientific and Religious Trust Company,' duly incorporated and generally known as the Pythagorean [252] Trust, which, consolidating with mind-curists, faith-curists, and other flourishing salvation syndicates, actually claimed a place among ordinary trusts, and at the same time pretended to a control over man's future life. ”

“ As assignee and receiver, the trust company acts in the same capacity for corporations as for individuals and firms or partnerships, assisting in winding up insolvent businesses and in conducting embarrassed ones. ”

“ Moreover, trust companies as agent often take up lines of business which they either cannot or would not engage in on their own account. Thus, a trust company can act as agent for fire or life insurance companies, for water, gas, and other public service corporations. In new communities and where it is difficult to find responsible representatives, the trust company can often render efficient service and secure a steady income without risk by assuming agencies of various sorts. ”

“ The trust company acts as the representative of both the living and the dead in practically every legal relation in which an individual is qualified to act. Its function is not only to keep intact the estate of which it has charge, but to look to and safeguard the interest of every beneficiary. ”

“ The trust company is empowered to lend money on speculative ventures which the insurance company and savings-bank may not do, so the "trust" lends the insurance company's vast accumulations and the savings-bank's hoard through the trust company with [215] great profit or tremendous loss and enjoys immunity from the consequences which should follow such disobedience of the law. Moreover, when the trust company shows a profit the "trust" appropriates it, and when a tremendous loss is sustained the insurance company or the savings-bank must bear it. ”

“ In the question of state supervision people who are connected with national banks have had things to say about trust companies. The laws under which trust companies were organized was wise legislation. I never heard of the failure of a trust company ; The trust companies have stood up through all times ; there is good reason for it. You take national banks which discount paper in time of great stringency, they have two names to look to, the trust company has security. Every trust company only permits loans on listed security, so that the officer has no chance to make a mistake. ”

“ In some States which formerly authorised trust companies to insure the fidelity of persons in positions of trust, or to guarantee titles to real estate, the more recent laws do not permit the combination of such business with the business of a trust company. ”

“ The mistaken impression that the corporate trustee, even more than the individual, is mindful only of the safety of the principal and entirely loses sight of the question of income, has arisen from the restrictions as to investments imposed by law, and frequently also by the will or trust deed, and from the fact that the individual executor or trustee, rightly or wrongly, sometimes assumes risks and personal liability which the proper rules of a trust company would not permit it to assume. ”

“ Do something, say something that will bring home to those who do business with us the fact that the Blank Trust Company is a very human institution—that it wants the good will of every man and woman in the country. ”

“ This accomplished, he transfers his rights to a "trust," or an association, or trust company, which is not only a bank [451] of deposit, but is also engaged in brokerage schemes, in financing large enterprises and promoting all kinds of corporate consolidations, and underwriting their stock for a consideration. ”

“ If the company has the right, in the just interests of its other clients, to ask these questions, as administering a large trust, has not the Church, which is also the administrator of a trust no less in the interest of other clients? ”

“ TRUST COMPANY, the name given to a form of fiduciary corporation, originally adopted in the United States under state laws to accomplish financial objects not specially provided for under the national banking system. The function which gives a trust company its name is to execute trusts for individuals, estates and corporations. In the United States, however, these functions have been extended to include many of those of commercial banks receiving deposits payable on demand and subject to check. ”

“ Enterprising men in almost every state have secured the passage of laws for what they call a Trust Company business. Generally speaking, what you cannot do under a Trust Company Charter is some kind of a business that has not yet been thought of.
There are 1,410 of such Trust Companies, so called, with capital amounting to $419,000,000 owing individual deposits amounting to $3,674,000,000 with $450,000,000 additional liabilities, or something over four billion dollars, all told. ”

“ The trust was adopted merely as a convenient means of making effective the sales of the agent under the contract. The duties of the trustee were purely ministerial, with no power to control, direct, or participate in, the conduct of the selling enterprise contemplated by the contract. There is to be found in the operation of the business no essential characteristic of corporate control-nothing analogous to a board of directors or shareholders, no exemption from personal liability, no issue of transferrable certificates of interest. ”

“ That a trust is a combination of capital, skill, or acts by two or more persons, firms, corporations, or associations of persons, or of two or more of them for either, any, or all of the following purposes: First, to create or carry out restrictions in trade. Second, to limit or reduce the production, or increase or reduce the price of merchandise or commodities. Third, to prevent competition in manufacture, making, transportation, sale, or purchase of merchandise, produce, or commodities. ”

“ An instance of a constructive trust upon which the courts have often been called upon to decide is the fiduciary relation between the promoter of a proposed joint-stock company and the members of the company when formed. ”

“ In those cases where the scheme of organization gives the promoters the power of selecting the directors who are to represent the company in the proposed purchase, they are bound to select competent and trustworthy persons who will act honestly in the interest of the shareholders. ”

“ The fictitious trustee, moreover, though not incapable of dissolution, is yet exempt from the inevitable mortality that afflicts mankind. He embodies and expresses, therefore, to a degree impossible in the case of natural trustees, the two elements of unity and of permanence which 292call for recognition in the case of collective interests. An incorporated company is a permanent unity, standing over against the multitudinous and variable body of shareholders whose rights and property it holds in trust. ”

“ Your orator further showeth that the assets of said corporation were in the hands of said corporations a trust fund, held by said corporations in trust to satisfy the claim of your orator herein set forth, before the shareholders of said corporations were entitled to receive any portion of the same ”

“ In the fiduciary area a bank is engaged in direct competition with other investment concepts and with non-banking fiduciaries. Failure or misadventure of a single trust may constitute a threat to public confidence among the bank's other trust beneficiaries, prospective trustors, and even the commercial activities of the bank itself. ”

“ The Congress made clear that 'disregard of trust relationships by those whom the law should regard as fiduciaries, are all a single seamless web' along with manipulation, investor's ignorance, and the like. ”

“ At the same time he has not an uncontrolled power of investment, for (unless authorised by the instrument creating the trust) he cannot lend trust money on personal security or invest in shares of a private company. A trustee of shares may be liable as a beneficial owner, even though his name appears on the register of the company as a trustee. By recent legislation trust ees, where not expressly forbidden by the instrument creating the trust, have either an absolute or qualified right to invest in certain securities. ”

“ Corporations are bad enough; it is one of the defects of the historical growth of law that the conditions which attend the birth of a legal idea so infinitely differ from those that make possible its greatest development; but the trust is to the corporation what the mitrailleuse is to a blunderbuss.
The “trust,” as the word is here employed, meaning by it a combination of property, real or personal, with powers of management or absolute disposal, or of stock in corporations, in the hands of a few persons, is a perfectly new device in the law. ”

“ The only escape, therefore, was to bring all such persons and corporations in the same trade together in one corporation, and this is precisely what we now term a trust. Before 1890, in other words, a trust was really an agreement, a combination of individuals or corporations usually resting upon an actual deed of trust under which the constituent parties surrendered their property or the control of their property to a central board of trustees ”

“ It is therefore not against the creation of Trusts, but against injustice, lawlessness, misrepresentation, looting and other evil practices in the management of Trusts that we have a good right to complain, and against which the strong arm of the law should be always raised. A well and honestly managed Trust can do business as legitimately, and with as much or more, advantage to the public, as any individual, any firm, or any small corporation can.
But there is constantly greater temptation to wrongdoing by those in control of large corporations than is the case in small ones. ”

“ It is safe to assume that the reader is somewhat familiar with the general charges which have been brought against the trusts; but even if this side of the story has not been heard, it is not unfair to look at them first from the standpoint of the men who make and manage them. In order to do this, suppose we select some particular trust which will serve as a type, and imagine that some frank, candid manufacturer, who is a member of this trust, comes before us to give an account of its formation and operations. ”

“ A Trust may be regarded from an economic aspect, or from a legal aspect. Economically, the term Trust is applied to a class of syndicates which have established a partial or total monopoly in certain productive industries by securing the ownership of a sufficient proportion of the instruments of production to enable them to control prices. Legally, a Trust is a form of business association—"a trust of corporate stocks by means of which a body of men united in interest are enabled to carry on business through separate corporate agencies." ”

“ One is necessary to the other, and they often shift places. But forward and forward Civilization forever goes—ascertaining the best way of doing things.
In commerce we have had the Individual Worker, the Partnership, the
Corporation, and now we have the Trust.
The Trust is simply Corporations forming a partnership. The thing is all an Evolution—a moving forward. It is all for man and it is all done by man. It is all done with the consent, aye, and approval of man.
The Trusts were made by the People, and the People can and will unmake them, should they ever prove an engine of oppression. ”

“ They have no interests to consult but those of their corporators. Those interests will prevent their abusing their trusts. But eleemosynary corporations are trustees of a sacred trust. For the most part they are managing the property of the departed. They are bound to respect in the highest degree the objects and directions declared by their founders and benefactors. They cannot surrender their franchises at pleasure. ”

“ An enterprise carried on by means of a trust may be secure from termination or interruption by the death of owners of beneficial interests and in this respect their interests are distinguished from those of partners and are akin to the interests of members of a corporation. And the trust type of organization facilitates, as does corporate organization, the transfer of beneficial interests without affecting the continuity of the enterprise, and also the introduction of large numbers of participants. ”

“ There is no term more common to-day than "trusts," and we are surrounded by "trusts," institutions whose workings during the past twenty years have awakened intense public curiosity to know what a "trust" is. Yet there is not extant a definition of a "trust" which conveys to the rank and file of the people any real idea of what a "trust" is. ”

“ The stockholders have parted with their property, and have nothing to show for it but the trust-certificate—a mere receipt, but upon which, if sealed or expressed to be for valuable consideration, it is doubtful if the law will imply any trust at all. The trust must, therefore, be declared by the trust-deed, assented to by the trustees or managers. ”