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Excerpt from Address Before the Literary Societies of Roanoke College, Ua Meantime a privileged class had gradually grown up within 'the States. Beginning with small associations, allowed in the supposed interest of trade, corporations had been created, and had been permitted in the same interest to increase and consolidate, until we had come to have a class of privileged and artificial creatures, more dangerous than any hereditary aristocracy; holding estates vaster than any noble; having con tinned existence; without moral or personal accountability; without conscience, and without possible inducement to public good; having for their best object the private good of their corporators, often, only the wrongful gain of their managers. To-day, some of these corporations virtually rule the States which created them, and exercise a controlling inuence in politics and business over thousands of miles of territory. So that when the war broke out we had already; in some degree, insensibly lost sight of every one of the great princi ples upon which the Fathers founded government - the limita tion of government, the localization of government, and the prevention of privileged classes. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.