float a large enterprise, joined their funds and in their associated capacity received as a matter of right a charter from the state. The charter, the powers of which were limited by the law of its authorization, at first special and afterward general, gave the corporation a personality having certain rights. As a consideration for these rights, the corporation assumed certain statutory burdens and regulations. Unless by the express or implied authority of its charter, a corporation cannot engage in business outside of the jurisdiction creating it. In other states it is a foreign corporation. As such, the other states may stipulate the conditions under which it may enter to do business. Here the Federal Constitution steps in. Under it Congress has the power to prescribe rules for the regulation of inter-state commerce. The organization of railway systems extending through several states and the increase in production of large manufacturing corporations, selling their output in many states, have given opportunities for national legislation. The diverse citizenship of corporations and the large interests represented by them have brought a constantly increasing number of cases into the federal courts. Thus the American law of corporations, a compound of national and state legislation and of federal and local decisions, is of increasing bulk and variety and no subject of the law has grown into greater importance, save perhaps the division of purely constitutional law, affecting personal rights.

For nearly two centuries and a half after the English colonies were planted in America, American jurisprudence changed gradually, keeping in harmony with the political and social conditions of the colonies and states. Then with a great wave of immigration and farreaching industrial changes and the occpuation of a continent from ocean to ocean, American jurisprudence set itself to meet the needs of a modern and complex society. The result has been an enormous product of legislation and a much bulkier output of decisions from the federal and state courts. A system of law, to be sound, must have an orderly development; it must be progressive and not revolutionary. Many of the changes which have taken place in America have likewise been adopted in England and for the same reason as in this country, Since 1875 the English procedure has been similar to the American. Both the English and American systems of jurisprudence are, therefore, parts of one great system, based upon the common law of England and built to satisfy the requirements of a modern commercial and industrial society, wherein personal freedom has the greatest possible play. Its idea of personal right is its heritage from the common law. See also various articles under LAW.

Consult: Two Centuries'; 'Growth of American Law'; Kent, Commentaries'; Story, 'Commentaries on the Constitution'; Minor, Institutes of Common and Statute Law; Cooley, Constitutional Law and History); Robinson, Elements of Law': Holmes, The Common Law; Pomeroy, Equity Jurisprudence and Remedies'; Fisher, 'Evolution of the Constitution of the United States' and Administration of Equity through Common Law Forms; Reinsch, English Common Law in the early American Colonies'; Sioussat,

English Statutes in Maryland'; Field, 'Law Reform in the United States'; Wilson, Courts of Chancery in America.' JESSE S. REEVES, Attorney, Richmond, Ind.

57. United States Intellectual Development of. If we search through history for the original forces from which all modern intellectual development seems to have proceeded, we undoubtedly trace these influences to Greece and Rome; but we find that there was, from the first, one essential difference between the two nations. Cicero, the greatest of Romans, points out that poets came late to Rome, but orators early. This is equally true of the United States of America as compared with European states, for Americans surprised older nations by developing statesmanship and oratory before a literature, in any proper sense, was born. There had been, here and there, in this country, detached fragments which might pass for literature, single sayings, fine passages, brief descriptions; but scarcely any purely original literary work had been done in any systematic way, at least none now much sought by the reader. Samuel Sewall wrote private diaries which were unconsciously amusing; Madam Sarah Knight wrote narratives of travel which are to this day readable, and were meant to be such. Mather wrote with great quaintness and sometimes with rhythmical beauty in his Magnalia. Freneau wrote poetry, Jonathan Edwards wrote theology, but none of these is now extensively read, not even Edwards on the Will; they are scarcely reprinted. Yet from the very first, the Revolutionary War brought forth an exhibition of statesmanship, in the documents sent forth by Jay, Lee, and Dickinson, which won the respect of the best European critics. Lord Chatham said in the House of Lords on 20 Jan. 1775, "I must declare and avow, that in all my reading and observation-and it has been my favorite study-I have read Thucydides, and have studied and admired the master-states of the world that for solidity of reasoning, force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclusion, under such a complication of difficult circumstances, no nation or body of men can stand in preference to the general Congress at Philadelphia." Meanwhile, Horace Walpole, the most brilliant English writer of his time, foresaw that the War of Independence had also remoter results to bring with it and had predicted to his friend Mason, two years before the Declaration of Independence, that there would one day be a Thucydides in Boston and an Xenophon in New York.

It must be remembered that the American Revolution took place when English literature as well as American was experiencing an ebb tide. For more than a century, the mother country had produced nothing in any high, imaginative direction; nothing, that is, between the death of Milton in 1674 and the publication of Burns' poems in 1786, and of Coleridge's and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads,' in 1798. The men of that period in England - as even Johnson, Pope, Addison, DeFoe, Goldsmith, Gibbon, Sterne,however highly esteemed in their day, were wanting on the ideal side; and the readers of a higher standard were glad to turn away from them all to collections of wayside poetry like

Percy's 'Reliques' and Scott's 'Border Minstrelsy. Accordingly when Fisher Ames, being laid on the shelf as a statesman, wrote the first really important essay on American literature an essay first published in 1899, after his death he treated literature itself as merely one of the ornaments of despotism. He wrote of it, "The time seems to be near, and, perhaps, is already arrived, when poetry, at least poetry of transcendent merit, will be considered among the lost arts. It is a long time since England has produced a first-rate poet. If America has not to boast at all what our parent country boasts no longer, it will not be thought a proof of the deficiency of our genius." Believing as he did, that human freedom could never last long in a democracy, he thought that perhaps when liberty had given place to an emperor, this monarch might desire to see splendor in his court and to occupy his subjects with the cultivation of the sciences. At any rate, he maintained "After some ages we shall have many poor and a few rich, many grossly ignorant, a considerable number learned, and a few eminently learned. Nature, never prodigal of her gifts, will produce some men of genius, who will be admired and imitated." The first part of his prophecy failed, but the latter part fulfilled itself in a manner quite unexpected.

The point which was ignored by Fisher Ames and by the whole Federalist party of his day was that there was already created on this side of the ocean, not merely a new nation but a new temperament. How far this temperament was to arise from a change of climate, and how far from a new political organization, no one could then foresee, nor is its origin yet fully analyzed; but the fact itself is now coming to be more and more recognized. "As I take it, Nature said, some years since, 'Thus far the English is my best race; but we have had Englishmen enough; now for another turning of the globe, and a further novelty. We need something with a little more buoyancy than the Englishman; let us lighten the structure even at some peril in the process. Put in one drop more of nervous fluid and make the American. With that drop, a new range of promise opened on the human race, and a lighter, finer, more highly organized type of mankind was born." This remark by an American called down the wrath of Matthew Arnold who called it "tall talk" or a species of brag, overlooking the fact that it was written as a physiological caution addressed to this nervous race against overworking its children in school. In reality, it is a point of the greatest importance. If Americans are to be merely duplicate Englishmen the experiment is not so very interesting, but if they are to represent a new human type, the sooner we know it, the better. No one finally did more to recognize this new type than when Matthew Arnold himself wrote afterward ('Nineteenth Century for September 1887) "Our countrymen [namely, the English, with a thousand good qualities, are really, perhaps, a good deal wanting in lucidity and flexibility," and again in the same essay, "The whole American nation may be called 'intelligent,' that is, quick." This would seem to yield the whole point between himself and the American writer whom he had criticised. One of the best indications of this very difference is the way in which American jour

nalists and magazinists are received in England and their English compeers among ourselves. An American author connected with the 'Saint Nicholas Magazine' was told by a London publisher that the plan of the periodical was essentially wrong. "These pages of riddles at the end, for instance," he said, "no child would ever guess them"; and though the American assured him that they were guessed regularly every month in 20,000 families or more, the publisher still shook his head. In the same way, they tell you many stories in London about Englishmen who have called on Mr. Choate or Mr. Depew to express their somewhat tardy appreciation of something very facetious said by them at some dinner-party the night before, but with which the auditor did not fairly grapple at the time. In the same way, Professor Tyndall used to say that whereas in his London lectures he made it a practice to explain each experiment three times,- once before he began to perform it, secondly, while the experiment was going on, and thirdly, after it was all over,he soon found that in America, he could omit one at least of these elucidations, and when he grew more accustomed to the fact could get on with only one out of the original three. He used, furthermore, to quote the leader of a company of Ethiopian minstrels with whom he took the voyage home from America and who had been accustomed to have his joke begin with the man in the middle of his semi-circle of performers, then to have it continued by one of the end-men, and finally brought to a climax by the other; but who, to his disgust, found every American audience laughing at his joke long before its full announcement was officially made. This quality in Americans, though commonly noticed most in matters of humor, is in reality temperamental in all directions and makes Americans not only better jokers, but better orators, better inventors, and even better business men than their English compeers. In all these different walks the quality is accompanied by possible drawbacks; quickness may end in too much haste, while slowness may imply deliberation and mature conviction. One notices in Parliament in what a hesitating and even bungling way the debaters often begin their remarks, while an average American would slide in far more easily. On the other hand, Americans doubtless find it harder to leave off and may well envy the pungent closing remark with which the Englishman often sits down. As to the element of humor in itself, it used to be the claim of a brilliant New York talker that he dined through three English counties on the strength of the old jokes which he found in the corners of an American Farmer's Almanac' which he had happened to put into his trunk.

It is to be doubted how thoroughly the English mind recognized this lighter intellectual element, either in Franklin or in Irving, though both were favorites in that country. But no one can help observing how much more promptly it was appreciated, if vaguely, on the part of Frenchmen. From Brissot and Volney, Chastellux and Crèvecoeur, down to Ampère and De Tocqueville there was an appreciation of this lighter quality which was denied to the English and this certainly seems to indicate that the change in temperament had already begun to show itself. Ampère especially notices what he

calls "Une veine Européenne" among the educated classes. Many years after, when Mrs. Frances Anne Kemble, writing in reference to the dramatic stage, pointed out that the theatrical instinct of Americans created in them an affinity for the French in which the English, hating exhibitions of emotion and self display, did not share, she recognized in our nation this tinge of the French temperament, while perhaps, giving an inadequate explanation of it.

It is a curious fact that this lighter element in the American, though visible even under the veil of Puritanism - - as, for instance, where Samuel Sewall dwells so dotingly upon his long series of successive courtships and still more apparent in the early southern writers, as in William Byrd, yet seemed to disappear during the period of the Revolution. Franklin, Adams, and Fisher Ames alone showed it among the grave orators of the Revolution, and so strong an impression was left by this that the kindly French observer, Philarète Chasles, made it a definite assertion in his Etudes sur la Littérature et les Mœurs des Anglo-Americans (Paris 1851) that all America did not even then possess a humorist ("Toute l'Amérique ne possède pas un humoriste," p. 339). He did not even recognize humor in Washington Irving, but regarded him only as a literary follower of Pope and Addison, while finding much charm in him and calling him the Wouvermans of American Literature. Beyond this, he could find no humorist, although already there was a boy of 16 on a Mississippi steamboat who was to take the lead among the humorists of the world, under the name of Mark Twain.

The literary development in the United States of America followed very closely on the organization of its government and its first headquarters lay for that reason in Philadelphia. The First Continental Congress met there, the Declaration of Independence went forth thence in 1776, and the Federal Constitution was put in shape there in 1787. All these were successive steps in the intellectual development of America, but construing the phrase more strictly, we also find that Philadelphia produced the first monthly magazine, the first daily newspaper, the first religious magazine, the first religious weekly, the first penny paper or illustrated comic paper or juvenile magazine or mathematical journal ever published in the United States. We also notice that the city produced or, at least, adopted and reared the first American writer of international reputation in Benjamin Franklin, and the first imaginative writer, or indeed, professional writer of any kind, in Charles Brockden Brown, the novelist. Franklin's personal history and also his innate humor were all identified with the nation's records; while Charles Brockden Brown's novels, although they were read and quoted in England and indeed perceptibly in Aluenced the Godwin and Shelley group of writers, are now universally pronounced to be hard to read and, though reprinted, are treated rather as historic monuments than as sources of pleasure. Still another remarkable memorial was Dennie's Portfolio, a magazine whose editor. like Franklin, had migrated from Boston, although he was unlike Franklin a Harvard graduate. Dennie kept his magazine singularly in touch with the advanced literary training just taking place in England, quoted early poems

by Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Leigh Hunt, and although he derided the new German literature, it was in the Kotzebue period, a period when there was hardly anything better to quote. His paper was in these respects the high-water mark of the Philadelphia culture of that day, while the low-water mark in that society must be judged from the fact that new books could there, as in the rest of the new commonwealths, be published only by subscription and scarcely ever as now, at the risk of book sellers; and also by the fact that the Loganian Library, the pioneer of all American libraries, was then opened only in the afternoon, when it became a sort of fashionable lounge.

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The new government, ere long, moved itself to New York, where the American Republic was finally organized in 1789 and the first strictly original school of authors took the name of Knickerbocker School, and was organized or at least drawn together by Washington Irving and his friends. Diedrich Knickerbocker was the first imaginative creation in the history of our country and furnished very distinctly the opening of a notable career, soon temporarily transferred to the other hemisphere. Irving's later books were of a higher grade and, although he spent a large part of his life in Europe, he was essentially an American at heart. He worked in many fields and was only slightly and incidentally tempted into fiction. This field was first preoccupied in America by two or three women, such as Mrs. Foster and Mrs. Rowson, whose highly wrought and quite tragic books such as the Coquette' and Charlotte Temple' went through many editions and were translated into various languages. Cooper then came upon the field and surpassed all others in the popularity of his works into which he introduced, for the first time, certain really American types, such as Leatherstocking, the woodsman; Long Tom Coffin, the sailor; and Chingachgook, the Indian. He had obvious faults which he shared with his contemporary English rival, Sir Walter Scott, faults including unreasonably long first chapters and very loosejointed plots. But he won without effort a wider international audience than has yet been secured by any other American writer, except Longfellow and Mrs. Stowe, each of these three reaching the limit of 30 or thereabouts in the variety of languages into which their books have been translated. No one can look over the catalogues of foreign book stores without seeing how remarkably this popularity has held its own, in the case of Cooper. Bryant, who is claimed with New York authors, belongs rather to Massachusetts where he was born and bred and where he drew from classic rural influences, even in his early youth, that high and delicate vein which seemed curiously inconsistent with his life as a hard-working journalist.

After the Philadelphia and New York periods, there came a marked outburst of intellectual activity which made Boston, instead of New York or Philadelphia, the temporary centre of American literary life. Such a group of authors as Channing. Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Thoreau, Parkman, and others had never before met in America. With these was developed a lecture system which spread itself all over the country, though the leading lecturers in almost all cases were, at first, from