The corporations had gradually become self-elected oligarchies of the worst kind.

The great corporations, railroads, express companies, mills, factories of every sort, which now cover our land and give employment to five times as many men and women as lived in all the colonies in 1763, are the creatures of our own time.

Certainly Birmingham has been rather lax in taking up electric illumination, and possibly more enterprise would have been evinced in this direction if the Corporation had not become dealers in gas and water on their own terms, viz., no competition allowed.

A modern corporation is a means of cooperation in the conduct of an enterprise which is so big that no one can conduct it, and which the resources of no one man are sufficient to finance.

A corporation is, therefore, an artificial or fictitious person, created under general law or by a special act of the legislature, [Footnote: This special act defining the powers and duties of the corporation is called its charter.] and capable of acting within prescribed limits as if it were a natural person, but beyond those limits incapable of acting at all.

Our experience has shown that when banking corporations have been the keepers of the public money, and been thereby made in effect the Treasury, the Government can have no guaranty that it can command the use of its own money for public purposes.