Page:Federal Reporter, 1st Series, Volume 1.djvu/102

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94 FEDEBAIi REPORTER. �be subject to prooeas here imder the recent decisions. Such a motion is not well advised for another reason: that the supreme court might, in one event, refuse to revise my action. Toland v. Sprague, 12 Pet. 300. �As the point has been fully argued, I see no impropriety in my giving my opinion upon it, taking the faets to be as I understood the parties to state them. Those facts are, that the corporations are chartered in Maine, and have each a principal, if not the principal, place of business in Massachu- setts, where most of the business, financial and other, except the actual manufacture, is done, and indeed from which the manufacture itaelf is directed and controlled. I suppose that most of the stockholders and officers live here. I do not mean to say that this fact alone would be very material. �The question is, whether such a corporation is suable here in a transitory action begun in the circuit court of the United States without an effectuai attachment of property. �The acts of congress from the beginning have prohibited the maintenance of original civil suits against any one unless he shall be an inhabitant of or be found within the district where the suit is brought. The foundation of natural justice upon which this practice was supposed to rest has been much vfeakened by the decision that, in admiralty, a personal action may be maintained against an absent defendant by attach- ment of his goods. Atkins v. Disintegratîng Co. 18 Wall. 272. �Formerly the circuit courts, following the high authority of Mr. Justice Nelson, were accustomed to hold that a corpo- ration could not be "found" beyond the limits of the state or country by whose authority it was chartered. This rule worked badly, and especially in patent cases, for if a corpora- tion by its agents maintained a flagrant breach of a patent right within any judicial district, there was no adequate re- dress in the place of infringement ; and if the corporation happened to be chartered in Europe, or South America or Canada, there was no adequate redress anywhere within the United States, for no one will affirm that the power to enjoin the agent and to sue him personally for damages will meet the requirements of ail or of most patent cases. ��� �