Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 32.djvu/733

697 I POWERS OF CORPORATIONS CREATED BY CONGRESS 697 nation-wide competition or threaten to exercise nation-wide monopoly. The growing sense of national unity and the experience of national efficiency acquired in the war will tend to bring pressure upon Con- gress to avail itself more freely of its power to create corporations, and the question naturally arises whether corporations engaged in business throughout the whole country should not be created and controlled by national authority and whether this should not apply not only to interstate railroads but also to trading companies and even to companies engaged in the manufacture of goods intended to be sold in interstate and foreign commerce. In his book on "Social Reform and the Constitution," published in 191 1, Professor Frank J. Goodnow, of Johns Hopkins, has a chapter on "Federal Incorporation" prepared under his direction by Mr. Sidney D. Moore Hudson. After examining the opinions of Chief Justice Marshall in M'Culloch v. Maryland and Osborn v. Bank of the United States, as well as the argument of Secretary Hamilton,^® he considers first, the constitutionality of the erection of federal corporations having power to engage in interstate com- merce, — trade as well as transportation, and secondly, whether such corporations may be granted the power to manufacture goods to be sold or transported in interstate commerce. He finds that no question has been made with regard to corporations engaged in transportation by land or water, and as to corpora- tions formed for the purpose of engaging in interstate trade, he says it must be shown that the corporations are such as to have, in fact, a relation to the regulation of interstate commerce suffi- ciently close to indicate that such regulation may reasonably be regarded as the purposes of Congress in the erection of the corpora- tion. And the suggestion is that if a railroad or a bridge company may be organized as an instrumentality of interstate commerce why may not companies be erected in order to provide a more efficient organization for carrying it on. He goes further and includes the manufacture of goods in the purposes for which federal corpora- tions may be organized by act of Congress, provided it is found in the judgment of Congress that the manufacture of goods to be transported or sold in interstate commerce is essential to rendering " 4 Wheat. (U. S.) 316 (1819), 9 Wheat. (U. S.) 738 (1824); 3 Hamilton's Works, Federal Ed. 448,