rights of high political importance to these subordinate tribunals.  The general heads of law on that subject are vulgar and trivial.  On them there is not much question.  But it is far from easy to determine what special acts, or what special neglect of action, shall subject corporations to a forfeiture.  There is so much laxity in this doctrine, that great room is left for favor or prejudice, which might give to the crown an entire dominion over those corporations.  On the other hand, it is undoubtedly true that every subordinate corporate right ought to be subject to control, to superior direction, and even to forfeiture upon just cause.  In this reason and law agree.  In every judgment given on a corporate right of great political importance, the policy and prudence make no small part of the question.  To these considerations a court of law is not competent; and, indeed, an attempt at the least intermixture of such ideas with the matter of law could have no other effect than wholly to corrupt the judicial character of the court in which such a cause should come to be tried.  It is besides to be remarked, that, if, in virtue of a legal process, a forfeiture should be adjudged, the court of law has no power to modify or mitigate.  The whole franchise is annihilated, and the corporate property goes into the hands of the crown.  They who hold the new doctrines concerning the power of the House of Commons ought well to consider in such a case by what means the corporate rights could be revived, or the property could be recovered out of the hands of the crown.  But Parliament can do what the courts neither can do nor ought to attempt.  Parliament is competent to give due weight to all political considerations.  It may modify, it may mitigate, and it may render perfectly secure, all that it does not think fit to take away.  It is not likely that Parliament will ever draw to itself the cognizance of questions concerning ordinary corporations, farther than to protect them, in case attempts are made to induce a forfeiture of their franchises.

The case of the East India Company is different even from that of the greatest of these corporations.  No monopoly of trade, beyond their own limits, is vested in the corporate body of any town or city in the kingdom.  Even within these limits the monopoly is not general.  The Company has the monopoly of the trade of half the world.  The first corporation of the kingdom has for the object of its jurisdiction only a few matters of subordinate police.  The East India Company governs an empire, through all its concerns and all its departments, from the lowest office of economy to the highest councils of state,—­an empire to which Great Britain is in comparison but a respectable province.  To leave these concerns without superior cognizance would be madness; to leave them to be judged in the courts below, on the principles of a confined jurisprudence, would be folly.  It is well, if the whole legislative power is competent