Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 32.djvu/737

POWERS OF CORPORATIONS CREATED BY CONGRESS 701 assertion that it departed from the rule laid down in M^Culloch v. Maryland and Oshorn v. Bank of the United Stales. "What those cases established," said the Chief Justice, "was that although a business was of a private nature and subject to state regulation, if it was of such a character as to cause it to be incidental to the successful discharge by a bank chartered by Congress of its public functions, it was competent for Congress to give the bank power to exercise such private business in cooperation with or as a part of its public authority." The court below had found that the new functions were quite different from those of a bank, but the Chief Justice said that under present conditions they were, in fact, incidental to the business of banks as now conducted by rival state banks, and there- fore might well have been found by Congress to be essential to the efficiency of the national banks. The court below, he said, had erred in not regarding the corporation as an entity and in regarding the new functions as segregated. This does not imply that what- ever functions might be given to the corporations created by Con- gress they could lawfully be exercised, but only, as the Chief Justice himself explains, that any particular functions must be considered as component parts of the operations of the bank as an entity, and by this it is clear that he meant its operation as a means of carrying into execution the powers conferred by the Constitution upon Congress. Chief Justice Marshall, in Osborn v. Bank of the United States, ^"^ said : "The constitutional power of Congress to create a bank, is derived altogether from the necessity of such an institution for the fiscal pur- poses of the Union. It is established, not for the benefit of the stock- holders, but for the benefit of the nation. It is a part of the fiscal means of the nation. Indeed, 'the power of creating a corporation is never used for its own sake, but for the purpose of efifecting something else.' ^* All its powers and faculties are conferred for this purpose and for- this alone, and it is to be supposed that no other or greater powers are con- ferred than are necessary to this end." " 9 Wheat. (U. S.) 738, 809, 810 (1824). »8 M'Culioch V. Maryland, 4 Wheat. (U. S.) 316, 411 (1819).