Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/341

Rh than one thousand marks each. The opinion of the United States consul-general at Frankfort-on-the-Main is that all these restrictions have not availed to prevent a regular "incorporation fever," from which he expects 'very disastrous results ere long.

In France there has been some agitation in favor of returning to the old system in operation till 1863 of "special concessions" by which the right to organize a joint-stock company was a favor granted by the Government, and not a right conferred by general statute. The weight of authority and influence is, however, against this retrograde movement. Leroy-Beaulieu, in considering it, recalls the fact that the prefect of police of Louis Philippe refused Leclaire permission to organize the great profitsharing company which was afterward established with signal success and which still bears his name. Leroy-Beaulieu adds, "We can bear the guardianship of law, but not of government." Certainly there should be no wish in this country to go back to the old system of special legislative charter, under which men made a business of lobbying for charters which were afterward sold to the highest bidder. One of the things upon which we can especially congratulate ourselves is of having got rid of this old source of legislative corruption, which gave us our wild-cat banks, and numberless other reasons for dreading it.

Our own experience may help us in dealing with frauds in founding if we will stop to consider the difference between the old State banks and our present national banks. The greater security of the latter comes largely from detailed legislation which prescribes the conditions under which artificial persons, designed for the transaction of a given business, will be permitted to be born. What we need at present as regards miscellaneous corporations is fuller knowledge of all the facts connected with their history, and especially of their genesis. Massachusetts is the only State that has collected statistics of private corporations at all comparable with those of the English register of joint-stock companies. Most of the States provide that all new corporations shall register with more or less fullness; but this is either a mere formality negligently performed, or else its sole object is to bring the corporation within reach of the tax-gatherer. The record is usually not published, or in some cases, as in Ohio, there is no way to trace in the published returns the outcome of the enterprises whose beginning is chronicled. In fact, our greatest need in preventing frauds in founding, as in preventing most other evils connected with corporate management, is completer publicity, and, as one result of this, fuller statistical data.

2. The proper regulation of the borrowing power. It has been stated on good authority, but is not true, that the evils of