“In discussing this theme, we must not make an indiscriminate attack upon corporations. The corporation limited to its proper uses is one of the most valuable of the many useful creations of law. One class of corporations has played a most important and conspicuous part in securing the liberties of mankind. It was the municipal corporations—the free cities and chartered towns—that preserved and developed the spirit of freedom during the darkness of the Middle Ages, and powerfully aided in the overthrow of the feudal system. The charters of London and of the lesser cities and towns of England made the most effective resistance to the tyranny of Charles II. and the judicial savagery of Jeffries. The spirit of the free town and the chartered colony taught our own fathers how to win their independence. The New England township was the political unit which formed the basis of most of our states. “This class of corporations have been most useful, and almost always safe, because they have been kept constantly within the control of the community for whose benefit they were created. The State has never surrendered the power of amending their charters. “Under the name of private corporations organizations have grown up, not for the perpetuation of a great charity, like a college or hospital, not to enable a company of citizens more conveniently to carry on a private industry, but a class of corporations unknown to the early law writers has arisen, and to them have been committed the vast powers of the railroad and the telegraph, the great instruments by which modern communities live, move, and have their being. “Since the dawn of history, the great thoroughfares have belonged to the people, have been known as the king’s highways or the public highways, and have been open to the free use of all, on payment of a small uniform tax or toll to keep them in repair. But now the most perfect and by far the most important roads known to mankind are owned and managed as private property by a comparatively small number of private citizens. “In all its uses the railroad is the most public of all our roads; and in all the objects to which its work relates, the railway corporation is as public as any organization can be. But in the start it was labeled a private corporation; and, so far as its legal status is concerned, it is now grouped with eleemosynary institutions and private charities, and enjoys similar immunities and exemptions. It remains to be seen how long the community will suffer itself to be the victim of an abstract definition.