Manufacturing corporations are created by special acts of legislation. In many States, rights to flow, and ruin, by inundation, most valuable lands along the course of rivers, and by the banks of ponds and lakes, to aid the water-power of mills, are granted to companies, and the land-owner is compelled to part with his meadows for such compensation as a committee or jury shall assess. In almost every town in New England there are hundreds, and often thousands, of acres of lands, that might be most productive to the farmer; overflowed half the year with water, to drive some old saw-mill, or grist-mill, or cotton-mill, which has not made a dividend, or paid expenses, for a quarter of a century. The whole water-power, which, perhaps, ruins for cultivation a thousand acres of fertile land, and divides and breaks up farms, by creating little creeks and swamps throughout all the neighboring valleys, is not worth, and would not be assessed, by impartial men, at one thousand dollars. Yet, though there is power to take the farmer's land for the benefit of manufacturers, there is no power to take down the company's dam for the benefit of agriculture. An old saw-mill, which can only run a few days in a Spring freshet, often swamps a half-township of land, because somebody's great-grandfather had a prescriptive right to flow, when lands were of no value, and saw-mills were a public blessing. There are numerous cases, within our own knowledge, where the very land overflowed and ruined by some incorporated company, would, if allowed to produce its natural growth of timber and wood, furnish ten times the fuel necessary to supply steam-engines, to propel the machinery carried by the water-power. Not satisfied with obstructing the streams in their course, the larger companies are, of late, making use of the interior lakes, fifty or a hundred miles inland, as reservoirs, to keep back water for the use of the mills in the summer droughts. Thus are thousands of acres of land drowned, and rendered worse than useless; for the water is kept up till Midsummer, and drawn off when a dog-day climate is just ready to convert the rich and slimy sediment of the pond into pestilential vapors. These waters, too, controlled by the mill-owners, are thus let down in floods, in Midsummer, to overflow the meadows and corn-fields of the farmer, or the intervals and bottom-lands below.