Such a corporation was composed of many persons of different ranks of
society--noblemen, merchants, and gentlemen--who banded together for a
particular undertaking, each contributing a sum of money and sharing in
the profits of the venture. It was organized under royal authority; it
received its charter, its grant of land, and its trading privileges from
the king and carried on its operations under his supervision and
control. The charter named all the persons originally included in the
corporation and gave them certain powers in the management of its
affairs, including the right to admit new members. The company was in
fact a little government set up by the king. When the members of the
corporation remained in England, as in the case of the Virginia Company,
they operated through agents sent to the colony. When they came over the
seas themselves and settled in America, as in the case of Massachusetts,
they became the direct government of the country they possessed. The
stockholders in that instance became the voters and the governor, the
chief magistrate.

[Illustration: JOHN WINTHROP, GOVERNOR OF THE MASSACHUSETTS BAY
COMPANY]

Four of the thirteen colonies in America owed their origins to the
trading corporation. It was the London Company, created by King James I,
in 1606, that laid during the following year the foundations of Virginia
at Jamestown. It was under the auspices of their West India Company,
chartered in 1621, that the Dutch planted the settlements of the New
Netherland in the valley of the Hudson. The founders of Massachusetts
were Puritan leaders and men of affairs whom King Charles I incorporated
in 1629 under the title: "The governor and company of the Massachusetts
Bay in New England." In this case the law did but incorporate a group
drawn together by religious ties. "We must be knit together as one man,"