The Corporation Manual Statutory Provisions Relating to the Organization, Copyright, 1908, by CORPORATION MANUAL COMPANY L 5544 MAR 3 1932 HOAGLAND-ADAMS Co., Composition and Electrotype Plates BERKELEY PRESS, Printers SMITH & HESSLER CO., Binders NEW YORK. INTRODUCTION The dominant questions of the day, in politics, law, and economics, are those relating to the organization and regulation of corporations, and their supervision and control by the state and national governments. On every platform, in every court, in every newspaper, magazine, and book, where public questions are settled or discussed, this subject is being considered as never before in the history of the nation. Corporate trading has developed to such magnitude within the past fifty years that it is safe to say the larger amount of the entire wealth of the country is now represented by the stock and securities of corporations. One railroad system alone has over seventy thousand shareholders, and one of the great industrial companies can boast of a still more numerous membership. Under the exacting demands of modern life, every form of business has found its most useful legal agency in the corporation. Practically ever since that day in 1795 when the legislature of North Carolina enacted the first general incorporation act in America, freedom of incorporation has been one of our fundamental political institutions, and was one of the prime factors in the extraordinary industrial development that marked the nineteenth century. In this, as in all other phases of rapid development in human affairs, the good has had its natural concomitant of evil, and the gamblers and other camp followers of finance have closely attended the real captains of industry. So pernicious have been the activities of this comparatively small number of adventurers, that many people are ready to believe, or even now believe, that the whole corporate system is rotten to the core. That there have been great abuses of the privileges of incorporation and that grave defects exist in the laws is undoubtedly true. The first prerequisite to the correction of the evils, however, is exact knowledge of the law as it is. The panacea for all corporate ills most commonly prescribed is legislation and more legislation. And this, too, in spite of the fact that past experience has shown the futility of correcting deep seated evils by hastily framed statutory enactments. The law governing the organization and regulation of corporations, and the rights, powers, and liabilities of their members, is in the main statutory. The common law as expounded by Coke and |