“It will be readily conceded that a corporation is strictly and really private when it is authorized to carry on such a business as a private citizen may carry on. But when the State has delegated to a corporation the sovereign right of eminent domain, the right to take from the private citizen, without his consent, a portion of his real estate, to build its structure across farm, garden, and lawn, into and through, over or under, the blocks, squares, streets, churches, and dwellings of incorporated cities and towns, across navigable rivers, and over and along public highways, it requires a stretch of the common imagination and much refinement and subtlety of the law to maintain the old fiction that such an organization is not a public corporation. “In view of the facts already set forth, the question returns, what is likely to be the effect of railway and other similar combinations upon our community and our political institutions? Is it true, as asserted by the British writer quoted above, that the state must soon recapture and control the railroads, or be captured and subjugated by them? Or do the phenomena we are witnessing indicate that general breaking-up of the social and political order of modern nations so confidently predicted by a class of philosophers whose opinions have hitherto made but little impression on the public mind? “The analogy between the industrial condition of society at the present time and the feudalism of the Middle Ages is both striking and instructive. “In the darkness and chaos of that period the feudal system was the first important step toward the organization of modern nations. Powerful chiefs and barons intrenched themselves in castles, and in return for submission and service gave to their vassals rude protection and ruder laws. But as the feudal chiefs grew in power and wealth they became the oppressors of their people, taxed and robbed them at will, and finally in their arrogance, defied the kings and emperors of the mediæval states. From their castles, planted on the great thoroughfares, they practiced the most capricious extortions on commerce and travel, and thus gave to modern language the phrase, ‘levy black-mail.’