Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/411

Rh corporation that I can propose or discover is that it is every corporation which is not public. The public corporation is distinguished in kind from other corporations by the fact that it is inclusive and involuntary. All other corporations are exclusive, but at the same time they are related to the members of the body politic, because whatever they do sooner or later in some measure affects these fellow-citizens. Whether we speak of private corporations or semi-public corporations, we are in reality using varied terms for what is essentially the same thing. The parish, the school district, the village, the county are public corporations. The legal persons not falling in this class are bodies that move and have their being within the societies making up the public corporations, and are properly distinguishable from each other only by the difference of degree in which their corporate conduct affects the public.

This view corresponds rather with the traditions of the common law than with recent attempts of economic theorists to discover a principle of distinction between semi-public and private corporations. Thus the position just taken is implicitly in the opinion rendered more than three hundred years ago by Lord Chief Justice Hale, that when private property is "affected with a public interest it ceases to be juris privatis only." Beach on corporations (Vol. I., ch. 3, § 30) says: "Property does become clothed with a public interest when used in a manner to make it of public consequence and affect the community at large." Reaffirmatives of this doctrine are numerous enough in American decisions (e. g., Munn vs. People of Ill.; 94 U. S., 115. 26).

Field on corporations asserts (Ch. 3, § 35): "All private corporations, however, are in a certain sense of public interest. In fact, the conferring of . . . . . . powers and functions upon a society of persons, and giving them privileges not commonly enjoyed without such grant, and thereby surrendering to the corporate body authority which otherwise must remain in the sovereignty of the state, can only be justified on the ground of the public benefit to be derived from the grant, and that the