Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/190

180 of parts it sees, not recognizing the fact that the engine can do nothing without the steam-generating boiler, and the boiler nothing without the water and the burning fuel, is a tendency which leads citizens to think that good government can be had by shaping public arrangements in this way or that way. Let us frame our state-machinery rightly, they urge, and all will be well.

Yet this belief in the innate virtues of constitutions is as baseless as was the belief in the natural superiorities of royal personages. Just as, of old, loyalty to ruling men kept alive faith in their powers and virtues, notwithstanding perpetual disproofs, so, in these modern days, loyalty to constitutional forms keeps alive this faith in their intrinsic worth, spite of ever-recurring demonstration that their worth is entirely conditional. That those forms only are efficient which have grown naturally out of character, and that, in the absence of fit character, forms artificially obtained will be inoperative, are well shown by the governments of trading corporations. Let its contemplate a typical instance of this government.

The proprietors of a certain railway-company (I am here giving my personal experience as one of them) were summoned to a special meeting. The notice calling them together stated that the directors had agreed to lease their line to another company; that every thing had been settled; that the company taking the lease was then in possession; and that the proprietors were to be asked for their approval on the day named in the notice. The meeting took place. The chairman gave an account of the negotiation, and the agreement entered into. A motion approving of the agreement was proposed, and seconded, and to some extent discussed—no notice whatever being taken of the extraordinary conduct of the board. Only when the motion was about to be put, did one proprietor protest against the astounding usurpation which the transaction implied. He said that there had grown up a wrong conception of the relation between boards of directors and bodies of proprietors; that boards had come to look upon themselves as supreme, and proprietors as subordinate, whereas, in fact, boards were simply agents appointed to act in the absence of their principals, the proprietors, and remained subject to their principals; that, if, in any private business, an absent proprietor received from his manager the news that he had leased the business, that the person taking it was then in possession, and that the proprietor's signature to the agreement was wanted, his prompt return would be followed by a result quite different from that looked for—namely, a dismissal of the manager for having exceeded his duty in a very astonishing manner. This protest against the deliberate trampling down of principles recognized by the constitution of companies met with no response whatever: not a solitary sympathizer joined in the protest, even in a qualified form. Not only was the motion of. approval carried, but it was carried without any definite knowledge of the agreement itself. Nothing more