And State Papers 153 



well of any corporations within its limits, and all 

 it had to do was to try to encourage their upbuild 

 ing. Now the big corporations, although nominal 

 ly the creatures of one State, usually do business in 

 other States, and in a very large number of cases 

 the wide variety of State laws on the subject of cor 

 porations has brought about the fact that the cor 

 poration is made in one State, but does almost all its 

 work in entirely different States. 



It has proved utterly impossible to get anything 

 like uniformity of legislation among the States. 

 Some States have passed laws about corporations 

 which, if they had not been ineffective, would have 

 totally prevented any important corporate work be 

 ing done within their limits. Other States have 

 such lax laws that there is no effective effort made 

 to control any of the abuses. As a result we have 

 a system of divided control where the nation has 

 something to say, but it is a little difficult to know 

 exactly how much, and where the different States 

 have each something to say, but where there is no 

 supreme power that can speak with authority. It 

 is, of course, a mere truism to say that every cor 

 poration, the smallest as well as the largest, is the 

 creature of the State. Where the corporation is 

 small there is very little need of exercising much 

 supervision over it, but the stupendous corporations 

 of the present day certainly should be under gov 

 ernmental supervision and regulation. The first 

 effort to make is to give somebody the power to 

 exercise that supervision, that regulation. We have 



