far as such attempt is successful, necessarily destructive of the ends and aims of republicanism, or indeed of the end and aims of any government which assumes any sovereignty. If a corporation may be given a franchise by a people, through their delegates, to exercise any power, by implication, however slight, which is unrepublican in its character, the government which has conferred it has ceased to be a republic. These corollaries may appear commonplace, but the habit which we have of contradicting them in our daily practice seems to me to be a warrant for their repetition.

There are then the two kinds of trusts, which for definiteness I will re-state: First, that which subsists between the quasi-public corporation and the shareholder, of the private and commercial kind, for profit. This we may designate, for the sake of distinction, as the lesser trust. Second, that which subsists between the quasi-public corporation and the citizens, as political equals. This, having an essentially public character involving equal political right, we may designate as the larger trust, or the trust for public right. It is necessary that the difference be tween these two should be clearly borne in mind. The first or lesser trust is essentially private and commercial. It is limited to the owning shareholders of the corporation. It is a trust arising out of the relations which those shareholders hold to each other as parties and privies. It is true that by its violation there come to be involved questions of public policy

and right, and that this violation has been the means of an immense inequality in the distribution of the fruits of industry. But nevertheless, in its structure it is a trust which is created by the act of the parties themselves, and comes under the definition of private trust. The other, which I have defined as the larger trust or trust for public right, is always essentially public. It is not only industrial but political as well. It concerns every individual as a citizen in the enjoyment of his equal political and industrial rights. It thus immediately affects the whole public. It arises, not from any agreement of parties, but results as a necessity from the act of creation of the franchise. In its higher quality it is constant in its effect upon the right of citizenship and political being, and cannot be divested of this influence. When we consider that the chief motive of the grantee of such franchise is private profit, or profit in which the public or the individual as a citizen of the republic does not directly partake, we discern in this an interest which is often apt to be in conflict with the public right. It must be plain, therefore, that such a grant rises out of the category of contract. There inheres in it the reservation of the sov ereign grantor, which cannot be divested. The incident of the larger trust relation thus becomes vitally necessary for the preservation of the supreme motive of the grant, that motive being the securing and maintaining of convenience in accordance with and subject to the equal right of the

citizen, a motive which involves the very existence of the republican State. The lesser trust, being merely for private gain, must always be held in strict subjection to the larger. Any other course means the inevitable surrender of so much of the principle of political freedom.

The Dartmouth College case, which will hereafter be more fully discussed, has become a prominent case because it has been been industriously employed by the railway interest to give to the relation of the State with the corporation the character of contract, with the corollary that the corporation is to be unrestricted, as a high contracting power, in the use of the franchise once obtained; in other words, that this franchise is to be construed in all respects as a contract between equals. To this end that authority has been wrenched from what seems to me to be its clear legitimate import. The particular case itself involved only the question of a purely private and eleemosynary corporation; but the railway interest has sedulously sought, in applying it to railway corporations, to ignore the idea of any public trust such as I have endeavored to show as being inherent in the grant of the franchise. But it will be seen, if what I have just advanced be true, that such a construction as the railway interest insists upon would make the franchise a gift of far more power than a republic could possibly confer,—a gift which by the giving would destroy the giver,-a republican suicide.

A brief history of the growth of the private trust relation, and of its influence on industrial progress, will serve to illustrate more clearly the necessity for the application of the principles which should govern the larger relation to existing industrial conditions. Throughout the history of England the abuse of custody was one of the most powerful hindrances to the progress of industry, until the private trust relation came to be duly defined and administered; thenceforth this relation came to be a most efficient means for the promotion of civilization. The abuse of the private trust relation, whilst it was unchecked, created and fostered iniquities in the narrower scope of civilization, which grew to such magnitude that they were counteracted only by revolution. Nothing was ever more insidious than the means employed by the ecclesiastics of the sixteenth century for absorbing the land of the kingdom by trust devices; nothing more adroit and cunning than the evasions. to which these ecclesiastics resorted in sustaining their devices. Driven by legislation from the employment of uses, they invented trusts. By one art and another they gradually absorbed many of the best lands of the kingdom for the service of the church, and thus impaired incentive and weakened industry. The first decisive blow which they received was from Henry VIII., when this absolute monarch seized their lands and divided them among the nobles. This involved a revolution so great as to put an end to the power of Romanism in England,

and largely to secularize politics. By the lifting of this burden a new and marked era of industry for Western civilization was reinaugurated. Nevertheless the Reformation and the appropriation of the ecclesiastical domains at first tended rather to confuse than to reorganize on a proper basis this trust relation. The courts of chancery remained for a considerable time mainly in the control of ecclesiastics and of statesmen who were not lawyers; and it was really not until the reign of Charles II. that the trust relation became completely appreciated and understood. From this time, so far as private trusts were concerned, order grew out of chaos.

The man who, as Lord Chancellor Campbell says, is recognized in the Hall of Westminster to this day as "the father of equity" is Sir Heneage Finch, afterwards the Earl of Nottingham. His influence marks, with a distinct outline, an epoch in equity jurisprudence. As a chancellor, he is described by Blackstone as "a person of the greatest abilities and uncorrupted integrity; and endued with a pervading genius, that enabled him to discover and pursue the true spirit of justice, notwithstanding the embarrassments raised by the narrow and technical notions which then prevailed in the courts of law, and the imperfect ideas of redress which had possessed the courts of equity. The reason and necessities of mankind, arising from the great change in property by the extension of trade and the abolition of military tenures, coöperated in establishing his plan, and en