THE PIONEERS OF AMERICAN INDUSTRY 37 



then most prominent. Much the largest corporations were 

 banks; and, with the exception of the United States bank, 

 there was but one that had as large a capital as $2,900,000. 

 Of the 330 state banks, only seven had as much as $2,000,000 

 capital, and only thirty as much as $1,000,000. Several of 

 the largest of these were in the south, and were heavily sub- 

 sidized by the states. Insurance companies were still smaller. 

 New York had two with $1,000,000 capital, and New Orleans 

 one; Philadelphia had one with $600,000; and in all the rest 

 of the country there were only fifteen with a capital of half a 

 million dollars. The great majority of both banks and insur- 

 ance companies were small concerns with less than $100,000 

 capital. Two or three of the big textile manufacturing com- 

 panies of New England had about a million capital in 1830; 

 but, for the most part, manufacturing companies were even 

 smaller than insurance companies. It would appear from 

 these facts that no great difficulty was experienced in raising 

 from half a million to one or two millions of capital for banks 

 and insurance companies. But it should be noted that all 

 the larger companies of this kind were organized in the com- 

 mercial cities, where most of the loanable capital of the 

 country was owned. The capital was supplied chiefly by 

 the business men of the cities where they were organized. 

 Except in the west and south, where state aid to banks was 

 common, banking corporations did not have to attract capital 

 from a distance or collect it from a great many small sources 

 in different communities. Moreover, in neither of these in- 

 dustries was the capital actually sunk in a single industrial 

 undertaking; it was in reality divided in loans among a great 

 number of different industries, chiefly commercial, and for 

 that reason involved much less risk than industries requiring 

 large fixed capital. The conditions for the formation of cor- 

 porations were, therefore, very favorable in these industries. 

 To a great extent, conditions were also favorable to the for- 

 mation of manufacturing companies. The amount of capital 

 necessary to establish a manufacturing industry was not 

 large, and could be easily supplied by a few men. The stock 

 of manufacturing companies was usually owned by the men 

 directly interested in the enterprise, and was rarely bought 



