THE EVOLUTION OF SECURITIES
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cance can be adequately grasped. Simple business partnerships,
in which two or more men engage in an enterprise together,
provide its capital, assume its debts, and divide its
profits, are older than the Pyramids. But the great stock corporation
of today, although its roots may extend back into
history as far or even further than the collegium of the Romans,
is nevertheless a comparatively new form of business organization.
Nothing, in fact, more clearly indicates how very
swiftly commerce, industry, and transportation have expanded
during the past half-century than the recent dates at which so
many of our greatest modern corporations have been organized.
[ndeed, many men who have yet to attain old age have lived
through that whole marvelous economic period in American
history which our historians are already calling “the age of big
business.”
With the constantly increasing amount of goods produced,
transported, and consumed, there has been an inevitable corresponding
increase in the size and capitalization of the business
organizations which conduct this production and distribution.
Profound economic forces in the modern world have
for over a century been constantly calling for larger and larger
operating units in almost all lines of business. Experience has
clearly shown that in most cases a large business enterprise can
be more advantageously conducted as a corporation than as a
partnership.
America’s Debt to Corporations.—It is peculiarly fitting
that the fullest and most rapid development of the stock corporation
as a mechanism for carrying on the “big business” of
the modern world should have occurred in the United States.
The stock corporation has entered more deeply into our history
than into that of any other modern nation. From its earliest
history North America has been explored by corporations,
colonized by corporations, and developed by corporations. To
be sure, Raleigh, Gilbert, and those other daring British searovers
who first attempted to establish colonies on our Atlantic
