Let us see how the stock company meets the demands for an improved form of association which were imperative at this time. (1) It insures permanence of operation. Individual stockholders or managers may die, but the company does not die with them; their places are filled, and the company continues with its original capital. (2) The contributor does not, like a partner, need to be a business man; does not, like a silent partner, need to have especial trust in the person of the managers. The contributor may be a foreigner, a child, or a woman, and the sources from which capital may be drawn are thus immensely extended. (3) Capitalists of every class are willing to contribute to the undertaking because of the peculiar safeguards which this form of association offers to them. In the first place, though the investment is permanent, from the standpoint of the company, and so enables the management to carry out far-sighted plans, yet it endures, from the standpoint of the individual subscriber, only so long as he pleases. The system of transferable shares enables a stockholder to sell out his interest at any time, and so change his investment. In the second place, the stockholders have a voice in the management of the company proportionate to their interest in it. They choose the persons to whom they will entrust the active direction of affairs, require periodical reports on the course of business from the managing directors, and have the power to change the directors if the conduct of affairs is not satisfactory. =167. Good and bad sides of joint stock companies.=—The reader would err if he assumed that all the advantages suggested above were secured immediately on the founding of the first stock companies. Experiments of various kinds were tried at the start, and only gradually did the companies take the form which they have assumed in modern law. The English East India Company, for instance, which was founded in 1600 as a regulated company, was made over into a joint stock company by degrees, and could not be regarded as permanently established on this basis for over fifty years. Generations of bitter experience were required to teach people the possible dangers as well as the possible benefits of this form of association.