Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 32.djvu/902

866 HARVARD LAW REVIEW cause after the union with Scotland the necessity for such recognition became patent, and the same thing applied to a considerable extent to corporations created by colonial legislatures. Then, too, as Professor Maitland has more than once suggested, the tremendous and on the whole most salutary exten- sion of trusteeship under the law of England made it often unnecessary to consider with care the position and the character of corporate bodies. Second question: Is it necessary to treat a corporation either as a mere fiction or as being a person in the same sense as is a human being? On this point the suggestions of Mr. Henderson are most important. It is impossible for me to say that I completely agree with the language he has used. I doubt whether in discussing the sort of legal problems with which his book deals any two persons wovdd ever use precisely the same terms. In truth, the language which a writer on law is compelled to use consists to a great extent of words, such as a right, a person, an interest, a corporation, and the like, which have a popular, and, therefore, a vaguer sense. No man can make himself intelligible if he departs utterly from this sense, or makes to himself a series of carefully defined terms which he treats as the real mean- ing of the words he uses. If this be carried out beyond very narrow limits, he will find that he has created a language of his own far inferior to the current language of every-day life in its impressiveness and needing, if it is to be understood, systematic translation. Third question: Is it not of primary importance to remember in dealing, e.g., with a foreign corporation, that though corporate rights do distinctly differ from the ordinary rights of the group of individuals who make up the corporation, yet the persons whose interests are affected are such group of individuals? That this inquiry must be answered affirmatively I am, as at present ad- vised, inclined to agree with Mr. Henderson, who clearly emphasizes the difference between the corporate body and the group whose interests are af- fected. But my own inclination is to go a little further than he does, or per- haps rather to enter upon a path which he has not fully pursued. My belief increases every day that there are "natural corporations," if the expression may be allowed, that is, groups of persons who act together for different ob- jects, some good and some bad, and on account of their acting together have many feelings, and do many actions which they would not entertain, and which they would not perform were it not for this habit of common action and common sentiment. This is what may be termed "corporate consciousness," and in my judgment the gravest mistake made both by English courts and by the British Parliament has been always, where possible, to incorporate such natural corporations when their aims are not injurious to the state, and, on the other hand, to treat such natural corporations as Ulegal where their aims are palpably injurious to the state. But I cannot at the moment express this idea with the accuracy and the reservations which it requires. I trust that at some future day I may be allowed to work it out with more fullness in the Harvard Law Review. Meanwhile I hope that your readers will study, and I may be able to re-study, Mr. Henderson's masterly essay. A. V. Dicey. Judicial Tenure in the United States. With especial reference to the tenure of federal judges. By William S. Carpenter, New Haven: Yale University Press. 1918. pp. ix, 234. In the classifications which academic organization has imposed upon us, judicial tenure no doubt belongs in the domain of politics. But personnel, mode of choice, and tenure of judges are not the least item in any effective program for the improvement of judicial administration of justice in this