In America, our memories fade too soon. By the time of the Constitution, our countrymen had already endured a hundred years of harsh domination by the East India Company, a corporation chartered by the King of England in 1600 to carry on the business of the throne. It maintained its own army, conducted its private wars around the world, exploited the helpless masses of India, and eventually opened up China for the opium trade. For more than one hundred years before the Declaration of Independence, the Hudson's Bay Company, still another corporation, had exploited the Indians and the furred animals of this continent to near extinction.

It was, of course, the East India Company's forcing of cheap, government-subsidized tea on the colonists that prompted the Boston Tea Party, a prelude to the American Revolution. Early in our history, our Founding Fathers rejected the corporate form as another of the king's tools for enslavement, casting it out with the remaining trappings of tyranny in favor of the simple rights of man.

Thus was born the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights.