Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/412

400 state in this way will be fully indemnified for the surrender or transfer of the supreme rights in respect to the authority conferred."

Thus the growing legal usage bases distinctions between private and semi-public corporations on their relation to public interest. This view practically assumes that the difference between private business and public business is only one of degree. All private business affects the public, and the question involved under our present subject is: What is the status of private business, especially in corporate form, when a general interest in it becomes evident to the public?

I will subdivide the question and ask first:

What is the functional relation of corporations to the state?

The answer is already implied. In a word, I regard the corporation, the syndicate, the trust, the capitalistic monopoly as pioneers of a better era of industrial gain and of social growth.

The first colonial charter of South Carolina reflected a phase of doctrine affecting a few at the time in England, by incorporating a clause which made it a punishable offense for anyone less closely related than a cousin german to plead a cause for another in court, or for anyone to accept pay for such service. It has become the fashion during the last three decades for states in adopting revised constitutions to reiterate in them words which had different associations from those which led to their formulation in protest against Elizabethan grants. Thus: "Monopolies are odious, contrary to the spirit of a free government and the principles of commerce, and ought not to be suffered." I venture the prediction that the time will come when the citizens of industrially freer America will regard these omnibus denunciations of monopolies as equally naïve with the colonial proscription of attorneys at law. We shall learn that monopoly is like fire—a good servant but a bad master. When we are ready to rewrite history upon the hypothesis that the discoverers, the inventors, the leaders of previous generations, have been so many retarders of civilization, we shall be prepared to continue autobiography of our own period in terms of the