to the amount of their aliquot share of stock, or often
not at all. Corporations may dissolve, and be reborn, divide, and
reunite, swallow up other corporations or often other persons.
Individuals cannot do so except by the easily broken bond of
co-partnership.

Trading corporations for profit were _practically_ unknown to the
Romans, or even to Continental countries--scholastic precedents
and the Venetian _commendam_ to the contrary notwithstanding. They
developed in England first out of the guild or out of the monastery;
but the religious corporation, although regarded with great jealousy
in the Statutes against Mortmain, which show that from the earliest
times our ancestors feared the attribute of immortality that
characterizes the corporation, have never had the principle of
limited, or no, personal liability. That, indeed, is said to have been
invented by the State of Connecticut (see below, chapter 10). They
were, however, often clothed with monopoly. In 1643 we find the
Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers of England, a business corporation,
with power to levy money on the members, and exclusive powers to trade
in its own products, which seem to have been clothing and woollen
manufactures. We have already mentioned the earlier charter to the
Eastland merchants. Mr. James Bryce has pointed out to me that the
objection of monopoly would not have been felt so much to apply to a
corporation chartered only for purposes of trade out of England. It
would seem, therefore, that the invention and growth of the secular
corporation was an accident of the legislation of Queen Elizabeth's
time; and arose rather from this desire to get a monopoly, than from
any conscious copying of the trade guilds, still less the religious
corporations of earlier dates; for the trade guilds were nothing but
a more or less voluntary association of men bound together in a very
indefinite bond, hardly more of a permanent effective body than any
changing group of men, such as a political party is, from year to
year; the only bond between them being that they happen at some
particular time to exercise a certain claim at a certain place; and
even the trade guilds, as we know, had somewhat the course of a modern
corporation. They became overgrown, aristocratic, swollen in fortune,
and monopolistic in tendency. To some extent in the English cities and
towns, and still more in France, they became tyrannous. And in the
previous reign of Henry VIII all re