Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 32.djvu/728

692 692 HARVARD LAW REVIEW power to act as trustees and executors and administrators and registrars of stocks and bonds, it was insisted that these functions bore no real relation to the purpose of serving the fiscal opera- tions of the government or regulating commerce among the states, nor to any of the federal purposes for which Congress had power to authorize corporations to be created; that the functions were not even the proper functions of a private banking business, but were governed by diflferent rules of law peculiarly within the province of the state and that the duties of executors and adminis- trators were derived and regulated wholly through state laws. The question came before the Supreme Court of Michigan in Grant Fellows, Attorney General v. First National Bank of Bay City^° and before the Supreme Court of Illinois in People ex rel. First National Bank of Joliet v. Brady, Auditor}^ In both cases the decision was that the permission given by Congress through the Federal Reserve Board to the national banks did not avail to authorize them to carry on the business of trust companies and registrars of stocks and bonds, nor to act as executors and administrators within the states. The decision of the Supreme Court of Michigan was taken to the Supreme Court of the United States and the judgment was reversed.^^ The effect was to overrule also the opinion of the Supreme Court of Illinois in the Joliet bank case. The opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States was delivered by the Chief Justice. He said the court below, while recognizing that it had been settled beyond dispute that Congress had power to organize banks and endow them with functions both of a pubhc and private character, had, "instead of testing the existence of the implied power to grant the par- ticular functions in question by considering the bank as created by Congress as an entity, with all the functions and attributes conferred upon it, rested the determination as to such power upon a separation of the particular functions from other attributes and functions of the bank, and ascertained the existence of the implied authority to confer them by considering them as segregated, that is, by disregarding their relation to the bank as component parts of its operation." " 192 Mich. 640, 159 N. W. 335 (1916). " 271 111. 100, no N. E. 864 (1915). An article of my own on the Illinois case, with an outline of the arguments of counsel and court, appeared in 16 COL. L. Rev. 386. 12 244 U. S. 416, 424 (1917).