Suppose you had a world where one man in every ten was gifted with immortality and with the right not to be answerable for anything that he did. You can easily see that the structure of society, at least as to property, labor, and business affairs, would be very decidedly altered. Yet this is what really happened with the invention of the modern corporation; only we have got completely used to it. It would be possible to have got on without any business corporations at all. Striking as this may seem at first thought, one must remember that the world got on very well without corporations for thousands of years, and that it was by a mere historical accident and a modern invention that the two great attributes of the corporation, immortality and personal irresponsibility, were brought about. All business might still be conducted, as it was in the Middle Ages, by individual men or by partnerships, and still we should have had very great single fortunes like that of Jacques Coeur in France, an early prototype of Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, or even vast hereditary fortunes kept in one family, like the Fuggers of Augsburg, and based on a natural monopoly--mineral salt--as is Mr. Rockefeller's upon mineral oil. Yet as lives are short and abilities not usually hereditary, the great corporation question of to-day would hardly have arisen. Nevertheless, it is presumed that no one, not even the greatest radical, would now propose to dispense with the invention of the business corporation with limited liability. A careful discussion of the two theories above referred to will be found in pages 1 to 28 of the report of the Committee on Corporation Laws to the legislature of Massachusetts, of January, 1903. The bill for a business corporation law recommended by this committee was enacted into law without substantial change, and has apparently been satisfactory in the six years it has been in force, as the amendments to it, except only as to the system of taxation of corporations, have been few and trifling. I venture to quote from the report referred to a few of the remarks of the commissioners upon the general question, as it is now out of print: The investigations of the committee, the results of which have been briefly summarized, have led to the following conclusions: _First_.--That the more important provisions of the present law regulating the organization and conduct of business corporations and the liability of its stockholders and officers are unsuited to modern business conditions. _Second_.--That the restrictions governing capitalization and the payment of stock as shown in the piecemeal legislation enlarging the classes of corporations which may organize under general laws are arbitrary or impossible of execution.