196 



other: It is " an organism, " "a conscious organism," " a moral oi'gan- 

 Ism," "a moral personality " (Mulford's The Nation, Ch. i). Obviously 

 all this is merely metaphor, and expresses nothing more than the admitted 

 fiction involved in the notion of a corporation in regarding it as a ficti- 

 tious or ideal person. There is, indeed, a very close analogy between 

 States or other corporations and natural persons ; but it is very unsafe 

 to reason from tliis analogy ; and to neglect to observe the essential differ- 

 ence between the two notions may involve the most serious errors. An 

 instance of a great judge being misled by it is famished by the decision 

 of Chief Justice Marshal in the celebrated Dartmouth College case, 4 

 Wheat, 508. 



In that case the principle was asserted that a charter to a corporation is 

 a contract, which, under the constitutional provisions forbidding the 

 enactment of laws impairing the obligation of contracts, could not be 

 altered by the State ; and the principle was held to apply to the charter 

 of the plaintiff — an eleemosynary corporation. But it is clear that, 

 strictly speaking, a corporation — which is a purely fictitious or imaginary 

 being — cannot itself have any rights, and that what we call the rights of a 

 corporation are, in fact, the rights of its stockholders, creditors or other 

 individuals beneficially interested ; and hence that the constitutional pro- 

 vision can have no application, if there are no such persons— as was in 

 fact the case before the court. Hence, in that case — as in all others where 

 property has no other owner — the beneficial interest in the property of 

 the corporation was in the State, and could deal with it as it pleased. Or, 

 to state the proposition more generally, all property held for charitable 

 purposes — at least, after the death of the donors — belongs to the State, 

 and may be disposed of by it according to its own views of what is right 

 and proper. 



A similar question was presented by the proposed legislation in Eng- 

 land for the disposition of the property of the old trade companies of 

 London ; which survived only for the purpose of holding the propert}' 

 vested in them several hundred years ago for charitable purposes. This 

 legislation was vehemently opposed as an invasion of private rights ; but 

 it is very evident, the funds being devoted to general charity, that only 

 the public had an interest in it. 



Here again, therefore, another example of petitio principii is pre- 

 sented, consisting in the monstrous assumption that not only the rights 

 of the subjects, but even their wills, and their persons are, in some mys- 

 terious way, transferred to, and incorporated in the fictitious Leviathan, 

 and that there is thus effected "a real unity of them all in one and the 

 same person ;" who is thus " enabled to perform the wills of them all " * 

 — a doctrine certainly as extravagant as that of the actual conversion of 

 bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, which Hobbes is never 

 tired of ridiculing.f 



But independently of these fallacies in the argument — which, were it 



* Leviathan, 81. t l<i; 4^. 276. 204. 



