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 even the trade guilds, as we know, had somewhat the course of a modern corporation.  They became overgrown, aristocratic, swollen in fortune, and monopolistic in tendency.  To some extent in the English cities and towns, and still more in France, they became tyrannous.  And in the previous reign of Henry VIII all religious corporations had been dissolved.

Not much, perhaps, remained for Cromwell’s Parliament to do.  The abuses of law-making, of the Star Chamber, and other non-common-law courts, of personal government, had been swept away under Charles I. In 1644 the Book of Common Prayer was abolished.  In 1646 the bishops were abolished, in 1648 the king and the House of Peers, and in 1649 the king was beheaded.  Cromwell’s Parliament was more interested in the raising of money and the dividing up royal lands than in constructive legislation.  They did find time to forbid the planting of tobacco in England, and to pass an act furthering the religion of Jesus Christ in New England; also a society for the foundation of the gospel in New England, with power to raise money or make collections for that purpose, provided always, they did not carry any gold, silver, plate, or money outside of England.  An act claiming that “the Indians are renouncing their heathen sorceries and betaking themselves to English schools and universities,” possibly refers to one Indian graduate of Harvard, Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, of the class of 1665.  There are statutes concerning the impressing of seamen; a bankruptcy act, a statute authorizing secular marriage without a priest or church ceremony, and the act for preferring veterans in the Spanish War in civil service, a statute which gives a respectable antiquity to our laws making a privileged class of veterans or the descendants of veterans of the Civil and Spanish Wars.  Under Cromwell they could exercise any trade without apprenticeship; a recent South Carolinian statute providing that Confederate veterans could exercise any trade without paying the usual license tax was held unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of South Carolina itself.

VI

AMERICAN LEGISLATION IN GENERAL