Ultra vires

“ I caught an occasional word, like 'oxygen' and 'psychokinesis.' What were you talking about?"
"He was telling me about Goat Hennessey's experiments, and how they differed from the rebels' experiments before Goat came to Ultra Vires," answered Maya.
"That kind of talk serves no good purpose," said Nuwell irritably. "The rebel movement has been broken now, and there's no point in thinking about the illegal things they tried to do."
They came down the slope and approached the southern airlock of Ultra Vires. The airlock was still sealed. ”

“ If the trust sought to merge the corporations themselves, or their franchises, it would be illegal beyond all question. If the trust provides for the assignment of all the corporate assets only, it is undoubtedly illegal, as ultra vires. And, even if the corporation merely relinquishes its power of management through and by its own stockholders, it is possibly ultra vires still.
But the usual way in which the corporate trust is affected is by assignment of stock, by all or a majority of the stockholders, to the managers of the trust. ”

“ Their huge, dark eyes seemed to look through her and beyond her.
"The sun moves toward this place, but there are no humans there now," boomed one of the Martians. "Nothing lives there now except small animals in the walls and corridors."
"This we know," answered Maya. "We wish to go there that we may communicate with other humans and have them come and get us."
She wanted to say that the supplies of oxygen in their marsuit tanks were inadequate to take them anywhere other than Ultra Vires, but she did not know how to say this properly in the Martian language. ”

“ It is now well settled that a corporation cannot avail itself of the defense of ultra vires when the contract has been, in good faith, fully performed by the other party, and the corporation has had the benefit of the performance and of the contract. As has been said, corporations, like natural persons, have power and capacity to do wrong. ”

“ So far as the powers of a national bank to pledge its assets are concerned, the form which Government takes-whether it appears as the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of War, or the Inland Waterways Corporation-is wholly immaterial. The motives which lead Government to clothe its activities in corporate form are entirely unrelated to the problem of safeguarding governmental deposits, and therefore irrelevant to the issue of ultra vires. ”

“ A director must also bear in mind—what is a fundamental principle of company management—that the funds of the company are entrusted to the directors for the objects of the company as defined by the company’s memorandum of association and authorized by the general law, and that they must not be diverted from those objects or applied to purposes which are outside the objects of the company, ultra vires, as it is commonly called, or outside the powers of management given by the shareholders to the directors. ”

“ If the sanitary authority wish to interfere in the question of fire, why should not the protection of life be considered as much as property? Yet no clause can be discovered in the model byelaws rendering it compulsory to make some provision in dwelling-houses or factories for the easy escape of the inmates in case of fire. Indeed, as the Public Health Act does not authorise the enactment of a byelaw for such a purpose, such a clause would most probably be held to be ultra vires. ”

“ Stockholders remain liable until their subscriptions are fully paid. Nothing but money is considered payment of capital stock except where property is purchased. Directors must usually be stockholders.
The right of a state to forfeit a corporation’s charter for misuser or non-user of its franchises is an implied term of the grant of incorporation. Corporations are liable for every wrong they commit, and in such cases cannot set up by way of protection the doctrine of ultra vires. ”

“ It is not for us to write a definition. That is the Administrator's duty.
Concluding, then, that when Congress granted exemptions for workers within the 'area of production (as defined by the Administrator) ' it restricted the Administrator to the drawing of geographic lines, even though he may take into account all relevant economic factors in the choice of areas open to him, the regulations which made discriminations within the area defined by applying the exemption only to plants with less than seven employees are ultra vires. ”

“ Probably both elements are active; as the relative immunity of the host rises the infectivity or virulence of the parasite must rise to an equal extent to maintain the equilibrium. If this were true we would find that in those localities in which the disease is endemic and where the population is relatively resistant there is a normally more virulent virus in existence. A stranger coming into such a community would, in view of his lower resistance to the virus, be more susceptible of becoming actively infected. ”

“ If, however, an individual from the community carrying the more virulent virus were to travel to another community where the greater proportion of the population was relatively less immune the field would be fertile for the beginning of an epidemic. Furthermore, there is the possibility of an outbreak in the first community if there should occur gross changes in its constitution; another infectious disease, a redistribution of the population with greater crowding, anything to change the balance between host and parasite. ”

“ On the other hand, he found the weakened virus could be again strengthened by inoculating a feeble animal such as a guinea-pig a day or two old with it, and then inoculating stronger and stronger animals: an increase in strength was gained with each inoculation, until at last the virus could attack the strongest. A similar increase in virulence appears to occur in plague, where animals, especially rats and mice, seem to be affected before human beings, and not only increase the virulence of the microbes, but convey the infection. ”

“ Clinical and epidemiologic investigations have yielded confirmatory evidence, and we are thus left with a conception of the virus of a given disease being distributed fairly widely throughout the world as an apparently harmless parasite on the human host, but taking on during epidemic periods a new and sinister role, only to relapse again into comparative quiescence as the epidemic subsides. ”

“ But undertakers are exposed to a still greater risk, namely: that of handling the remains of those who have died from the effects of those same diseases. Not only do they have to guard against the infectious character of the contagion, but they have also to protect themselves against the malignant effluvia which emanates from the victims of the contagion after disintegration of the body has taken place, the nauseous and sickening gases which are generated by decay, and the deadly virus which may be innoculated into the system, either through some puncture or abrasion of the skin ”

“ Using such technologies, which have been utilized to investigate Ebola, pandemic flu, influenza, hanta viruses, lassa, rabies, and Marburg viruses, there is no need for a bioweaponeer to isolate the virus from an infected patient, acquire it from a germ bank, or culture it from nature. ”

“ As a rule the virulence does not become so great as to cause a true pandemic, but at rare intervals, usually of decades, or thereabouts, the epidemic virus becomes so greatly enhanced, perhaps from passage to new territory and through non-immune individuals, that it eventually commences on its wild career around the earth. ”

“ It is curious also to observe, that the virus, which with respect to its effects is undetermined and uncertain previously to its passing from the horse through the medium of the cow, should then not only become more active, but should invariably and completely possess those specific properties which induce in the human constitution symptoms similar to those of the variolous fever, and effect in it that peculiar change which for ever renders it unsusceptible of the variolous contagion. ”

“ Formed of a special microbe of an extreme minuteness, this virus may be multiplied by artificial culture outside the animal body. These cultures, left alone without any possible external contamination, undergo, in the course of time, modifications of their virulency to a greater or less extent. The oxygen of the atmosphere is said to be the chief cause of these attenuations—that is, this lessening of the facilities of multiplication of the microbe; for it is evident that the difference of virulence is in some way associated with differences of development in the parasitic economy. ”

“ Humanized virus was, however, open to the objection that it could communicate disease if the child were not perfectly healthy, and as a matter of fact it did communicate syphilis in a certain number of instances. The possibility of this infection was so serious an objection to the use of virus from this source that in the last quarter of the century calf virus, recommended and used in Italy many years before, was gradually substituted for human virus, and at the present time the use of animal virus is general in Europe and in the United States. ”

“ Each contagious disease breeds only its own kind, and no other. When we experiment with an isolated disease-producing, germ it causes always one and the same affection, if it takes hold at all.
But evidence is beginning to accumulate that, though we can not change one species into another, we can modify the power and activity, in short, the virulence, of parasites. Pasteur has shown that when the bacteria of chicken cholera are kept in an open vessel, exposed to the air for many months, their power to struggle with the animal cells is gradually enfeebled. ”

“ But it is obvious that, in the majority of cases, it must be impossible to decide by which of these channels the disease is conveyed, from the nature of the intercourse between the physician and the patient.
3. It is not pretended that the contagion of puerperal fever must always be followed by the disease. It is true of all contagious diseases that they frequently spare those who appear to be fully submitted to their influence. Even the vaccine virus, fresh from the subject, fails every day to produce its legitimate effect, though every precaution is taken to insure its action. ”

“ Upon the answer to this question more than upon any other one thing rests our choice of methods of eradication. Any procedures of preventive medicine that may be undertaken on the assumption that the source of pandemic influenza is to be found in one or a few endemic foci, such as the one supposed to exist in Turkestan, would fail utterly should the true condition be that of a universal distribution of a relatively avirulent virus which from time to time from some unknown cause assumes a highly increased virulence. ”

“ The virus of influenza is more or less uniformly distributed throughout the world. We may say that it is endemic in many localities, as is the case with the meningococcus. Quite frequently in one locality or another the virus acquires increased virulence and causes a small local epidemic which may even spread to adjoining territories. It is possible that the virus in two or more separated localities may become more invasive simultaneously, thus causing widely separated and unrelated outbreaks. ”

“ It is recognized nearly every year in one or another place on the earth where it becomes epidemic. From time to time from some point or center, or from several points, as for instance simultaneously in the old and new world, and for reasons unknown to us, an enormous increase in virulence of the specific virus occurs and with it a great increase in the contagiousness of the disease. Those are the times when influenza spreads in mighty epidemics over wide stretches of land and portions of the earth, or over the whole earth. ”

“ For example, developing, testing and deploying a new vaccine may be feasible for endemic pathogens or slowly moving epidemics, but may not be practical for a rapidly moving infectious disease outbreak. Until the pathogenesis of the disease, nature of vectors and mechanisms of spread are understood, caution must be exercised in making assumptions in the design of MCM.
Flaviviruses can appear significantly more pathogenic when introduced into new niches and populations, but as a new virus becomes established, herd immunity effects often attenuate apparent virulence. ”

“ Up to the present about twenty diseases are known to be due to a filterable virus, and among these are some of the most important for animals and for man. Among the human diseases, yellow fever, poliomyelitis, and dengue are so produced; of the animal diseases in addition to foot and mouth disease, pleuropneumonia, cattle plague, African horse sickness, several diseases of fowls and the mosaic disease of the tobacco plant have all been shown to be due to a filterable virus. Of these organisms the largest is that which produces pleuropneumonia in cattle, and this alone has been cultivated. ”

“ It seems possible that the Bacillus pestis may have been present in a non-virulent state in the Chinese coolies, and assumed new virulence, vigor, and a somewhat different form, when transplanted into virgin soil. The high mortality and infectivity of this epidemic strongly suggest it.
On this basis the epidemics which have followed all great wars may be explained. If a nation or tribe can survive any disease long enough it will acquire immunity to that disease. When, however, foreign people commingle freely and intimately, as in war, epidemics will break out. ”