A further word should be given to the origin of the business corporation, an almost accidental event, which has affected the world of trade and affairs more than the invention of printing, of the bill of exchange, and the Law Merchant combined. It would have been perfectly possible for the world to get on and do business without the modern corporation--without the invention of a fictitious person clothed with the enormously powerful attributes of immortality and irresponsibility. That is to say, men can act together or in partnership, but they are mortal, and at their death their personal powers end. The corporation may be immortal, and its powers, as well as its acquisitions, increase forever. Men are liable with all their estates for their contracts and obligations. Men in corporations are only liable to the amount of their aliquot share of stock, or often not at all. Corporations may dissolve, and be reborn, divide, and reunite, swallow up other corporations or often other persons. Individuals cannot do so except by the easily broken bond of co-partnership. Trading corporations for profit were _practically_ unknown to the Romans, or even to Continental countries--scholastic precedents and the Venetian _commendam_ to the contrary notwithstanding. They developed in England first out of the guild or out of the monastery; but the religious corporation, although regarded with great jealousy in the Statutes against Mortmain, which show that from the earliest times our ancestors feared the attribute of immortality that characterizes the corporation, have never had the principle of limited, or no, personal liability. That, indeed, is said to have been invented by the State of Connecticut (see below, chapter 10). They were, however, often clothed with monopoly. In 1643 we find the Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers of England, a business corporation, with power to levy money on the members, and exclusive powers to trade in its own products, which seem to have been clothing and woollen manufactures. We have already mentioned the earlier charter to the Eastland merchants. Mr. James Bryce has pointed out to me that the objection of monopoly would not have been felt so much to apply to a corporation chartered only for purposes of trade out of England. It would seem, therefore, that the invention and growth of the secular corporation was an accident of the legislation of Queen Elizabeth's time; and arose rather from this desire to get a monopoly, than from any conscious copying of the trade guilds, still less the religious corporations of earlier dates; for the trade guilds were nothing but a more or less voluntary association of men bound together in a very indefinite bond, hardly more of a permanent effective body than any changing group of men, such as a political party is, from year to year; the only bond between them being that they happen at some particular time to exercise a certain claim at a certain place; and