d. This was that the company should add to its name
the word "Limited "--paint it up on its premises, and use it on all
invoices, bills, promissory notes and other documents. The proposal was
adopted by the Legislature and has worked successfully. While limited
companies have been multiplying at the rate of over 4000 a year, the
unlimited company has become practically an extinct species. The growth
of limited companies is, indeed, one of the most striking phenomena of
our day. Their number may be estimated at quite 40,000. Their paid-up
capital amounts to the stupendous sum of L1,850,000,000 and, what is
even more significant, as the 1st Viscount Goschen remarks in his
_Essays and Addresses_, is that "the number of shareholders has grown in
a much greater ratio than the colossal growth of the aggregate capital.
The profits and risks of nearly every kind of business have been spread
from year to year over fresh thousands of individuals, and the middle
class with moderate incomes are more and more participating in that
accumulation of wealth from business of every description which formerly
built up the fortunes of individual traders or of bankers or of single
families."

It is with the limited company then--the company limited by shares--as
the normal type and incomparably the most important, that this article
mainly deals.

_Companies Limited by Shares._--The Companies Act 1862, was intended to
constitute a comprehensive code of law applicable to joint stock trading
companies for the whole of the United Kingdom. Recognizing the mischief
above alluded to--of trading concerns being carried on by large and
fluctuating bodies, the act begins by declaring that no company,
association or partnership, consisting of more than twenty persons, or
ten in the case of banking, shall be formed after the commencement of
the act for the purpose of carrying on any business which has for its
object the acquisition of gain by the company, association or
partnership, or by the individual members thereof, unless it is
registered as a company under the act, or is formed in pursuance of some
other act of parliament or of letters patent, or is a company engaged in
working mines within and subject to the jurisdiction of the Stannaries.
Broadly speaking, the meaning of the act is that all commercial
undertakings, as distinguished from literary or charitable associations,
shall be registered. "Business" has a more extensive signification than