Page:The Rise of American Civilization (Volume 1).djvu/49

 charter issued by the Crown, which formed a superior law binding constituents and officers.

Like the state, it had a territorial basis—a grant of land often greater in area than a score of European principalities. It was a little democracy in itself, for its stockholders admitted new members to the suffrage, elected their own officers, and made by-laws. It exercised many functions of a sovereign government: it could make assessments, coin money, regulate trade, dispose of corporate property, collect taxes, manage a treasury, and provide for defense. Thus every essential element long afterward found in the government of the American state appeared in the chartered corporation that started English civilization in America.

Moreover, that other great arm of the English state, the Church, usually formed an integral part of these corporate enterprises. As a matter of zeal in some instances and of form in others, colonial companies were generally charged with the duty of "propagating the Christian religion to such people as yet live in darkness and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and worship of God"—to use the language of the first Virginia charter. Either in fact or in theory to conciliate high powers in England, this meant the faith of the Anglican Church established by law. In the Virginia colony, there was no doubt about the injunction: the Company made the creed of that Church the strict rule of the plantation. The first legislature assembled on the soil of America, the Virginia House of Burgesses, enacted that "all persons whatsoever upon the Sabbath days shall frequent divine service and sermons, both forenoon and afternoon."

Such was the nature of the agency created by James I in 1606 when he issued the first charter to the London Company commissioning it to establish the colony of Virginia. Among the men whose enthusiasm called the corporation