Page:The History of the Standard Oil Company Vol 2.djvu/193

 Some two years ago a quo warranto issued in the name of the state of Ohio against the Standard Oil Company, a corporation of the state of Ohio, setting forth this trust agreement and alleging that that corporation, by becoming a party thereto, had done an act beyond its power, and thereby had forfeited its charter. The defendant corporation denied that it was a party to the agreement, and alleged that the agreement was on its face, and plainly, an agreement only between individuals, owners of corporate stocks, relating to their personal property, and was neither made by the corporation nor for the corporation. The court, however, held that the agreement was a corporate agreement, and decreed, among other things, that the corporation must cease to permit trustees to vote upon stocks held in trust.

"As this agreement was not entered into as a corporate agreement, and as this decision gives it an effect quite different from the intent of the parties who entered into it, it seems better to end it."

It is probable that Mr. DoodDodd [sic] had foreseen from the first just such an attack on his agreement as had come, for he had put into that instrument a paragraph providing for a dissolution, and it was in accordance with that article that the trust was now dissolved. The trustees were to continue to exist—under a new name: "Liquidating trustees." The property they had to take care of was vastly in excess of what it had been ten years before. Then the capital of the thirty-nine constituent companies was $70,000,000. These companies had been combined until they had been reduced to twenty, and their combined capital was now $102,233,700. Property of about $20,000,000 in excess of the capital was held by the trustees. Mr. Dodd's resolution provided for the division of this property, and for the transfer of the trust certificates back to the corporations to which they belonged. The individual holders of the trust certificates were to get in exchange a proportionate share in each of the twenty companies. "A will not get stock in one corporation and B in another; each will get his due