We can trace two other decided tendencies in recent legislation about corporations. First, the increasing effort to bring about publicity of all such matters as well as of the annual books and accounts, well exemplified in the Massachusetts statute; second, the usual strong prohibitions against consolidations to permit trusts or contracts to further monopoly. There has also been a still more recent line of legislation to prevent corporations from holding stock in other corporations, or, at least, in competing companies; and to prevent alien corporations from holding land.[1] Under the strict common law no corporation could own or hold stock in another corporation or in itself. This has been completely departed from in practice in this country, and though not affirmatively recognized in most statutes--the Massachusetts statute, for instance, carefully avoids providing that the corporation may own stock in other companies--yet the practice has been universally ratified by the courts, if not by the implications of legislation. This new tendency to forbid it therefore is merely a return to common-law doctrine. Thus,[2] in 1903 only five States--Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania--provided generally that a corporation might own stock in another corporation; two States--Indiana and Minnesota--so provided as to manufacturing or mining companies. In New York, Ohio, and other States, a corporation could only own stock in another corporation engaged in a similar business, or a business useful or subsidiary, or in a corporation (New York) with which it was legally entitled to consolidate; but the tendency of recent legislation is precisely opposite on this point, forbidding stockholding by all corporations in similar or competing companies, or more specifically forbidding stockholding in similar or competing companies, as well as stockholding by railroads in railroad companies. [Footnote 1: See below, chap. 16.] [Footnote 2: MacLeod, p. 203.]