There are some phrases in this passage which imply a disputable theory. However, the main point is that the American State is, to say the least, very like a corporation: it has private rights, power to sue and the like. This seems to me the result to which English law would naturally have come, had not that foolish parson led it astray. There is nothing in this idea that is incompatible with hereditary
kingship. "The king and his subjects together compose the corporation, and he is incorporated with them and they with him, and he is the head and they are the members." There is no cause for despair when "the people of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland and Tasmania, humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God, have agreed to unite in one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland". We may miss the old words that were used of Connecticut and Rhode Island: "one body corporate and politic in fact and name"; but "united in a Federal Commonwealth under the name of the Commonwealth of Australia" seems amply to fill their place. And a body politic may be a member of another body politic.

But we must return from an expanding Empire, or rather Commonwealth, to that thin little thought the corporation sole, and we may inquire whether it has struck root, whether it has flourished, whether it is doing us any good.

Were there at the beginning of the nineteenth century more than two corporations sole that were not ecclesiastical? Coke had coupled the Chamberlain of the City of London with the King. But the class of corporations sole was slow to grow, and this seems to me a sure proof that the idea was sterile and unprofitable. It is but too likely that I have missed some instances, but provisionally I will claim the third place in the list for the Postmaster-General. In 1840 the Postmaster-General and his successors "is and are" made "a body corporate" for the purpose of holding and taking conveyances and leases of lands and hereditaments for the service of the Post Office. 

From the Act that effected this incorporation we may learn that the Postmaster as a mere individual had been holding land in trust for the Crown. One of the main reasons, I take it, for erecting some new corporations sole was that our "Crown", being more or less identifiable with the King, it was difficult to make the Crown a leaseholder or copyholder in a direct and simple fashion. The Treasurer of Public Charities was made a corporation sole in 1853. Then in 1855 the Secretary of State entrusted with the seals of the War Department was enabled to hold land as a corporation sole Perhaps if there were a Lord High Admiral he would be a corporation sole vel quasi. The
Solicitor to the Treasury was made a corporation sole in 1876, and this corporation sole can hold "real and personal property of every description" All this -- and there is more to be said of Boards such as the Board of Trade and the Board of Agriculture and so forth -- seems to me to be the outcome of an awkward endeavour to ignore the personality of the greatest body corporate and politic that has ever existed. And after all, we must ask whether this device does its work. The throne, it is true, is never vacant, for the kingship is entailed and inherited. But we have yet to be taught that the Solicitor to the Treasury never dies. When a Postmaster-General dies, what becomes of the freehold of countless post offices? If we pursue the ecclesiastical analogy -- and it is the only analogy -- we must let the freehold fall into abeyance, for, when all is said, our corporation sole is a man who dies. Suppose that a prisoner is indicted for stealing a letter being the proper goods of "the Postmaster-General", and suppose that he objects that at the time in question there was no Postmaster-General, he can be silenced; but this is so, not because the Postmaster is a corporation sole, but because a statute seems to have said with sufficient clearness that the indictment is good. So long as the State is not seen to be a person, we must either make an unwarrantably free use of the King's name, or else we must for ever be laboriously stopping holes through which a criminal might glide.

A critical question would be whether the man who is Postmaster for the time being could be indicted for stealing the goods of the Postmaster, or whether the Solicitor to the Treasury could sue the man who happened to be the Treasury's Solicitor. Not until some such questions have been answered in the affirmative have we any reason for saying that the corporation sole is one person and the natural man another.

I am aware of only one instance in which a general law, as distinguished from privilegia for this or
that officer of the central government, has conferred the quality of sole-corporateness or corporate-soleness upon a class of office-holders. The exceptional case is that of the clerks of the peace. This arrangement, made in 1858, was convenient because we did not and do not regard the justices of the peace as a corporation. But then so soon as the affairs of the counties were placed upon a modern footing by the Act of 1888, a corporation aggregate took the place of the corporation sole, and what had been vested in the clerk of the peace became vested in the county council. Such is the destined fate of all corporations sole.

Our Taxes
Crown as Corporation - Page 1
Crown as Corporation - Page 2
Crown as Corporation - Page 3
Crown as Corporation - Page 4
Crown as Corporation - Page 5
Crown as Corporation - Page 6
Crown as Corporation - Page 8