Other defects of loose and imperfect thinking upon the Corporation were pointed out to the readers of the _Law Quarterly Review_ in the articles entitled the "Corporation Sole and the Crown as Corporation." The American State has private rights; it has power to sue: English law, on the other hand, had never yet formally admitted that the Corporate realm, besides being the wielder of public power, might also be the subject of private rights, the owner of lands and chattels. Our habit is to speak of the Sovereign as a corporation sole, and to refuse to recognise him as the head of a complex and highly organised "corporation aggregate of many." Such modes of thought, however well they may have fitted the designs of Tudor despotism, were neither appropriate to the needs of a free community nor adjusted to the conditions of modern life. The talk about "Kings who do not die, who are never under age, who are ubiquitous, who do no wrong and think no wrong" had "not been innocuous"; and other practical inconveniences were involved in the identification of the Common-wealth with the person of the Sovereign and in the failure to discriminate between the natural and official aspects of the Sovereign's personality. Special legislation, for instance, had been required to secure private estates for Kings. For these insular peculiarities there were, of course, assignable historical reasons, and one of these reasons, which Maitland was the first to suggest, is certainly very curious. The idea of treating the King of England as a corporation sole had occurred to Coke, or some other lawyer of Coke's day, because the parson had already been treated as a corporation sole. Why, when and how the parson came so to be treated furnishes matter for a very pretty piece of historical investigation. Who would have imagined that an unfortunate analogy, striking across the mind of a Tudor lawyer, would have helped to give to the legal aspect of the English State a peculiar colour--a colour different from that which it has received, for instance, in America. Without a superb knowledge of the Year Books, who could have fixed the offence upon Richard Broke or upon one of Richard Broke's contemporaries? And how many men, having mastered the recondite knowledge of the Year Books, would have retained a sense of the large perspectives of history sufficiently strong and vivid as to apprehend the successive legal and political forces which gave support to a "juristic abortion" through three and a half centuries of national life?