At the time of the Dartmouth decision little attention was paid to it outside of New Hampshire and Massachusetts.[772] The people, and even the bar, were too much occupied with bank troubles, insolvency, and the swiftly approaching slavery question, to bother about a small New Hampshire college. The profound effect of Marshall's opinion was first noted in the _North American Review_ a year after the Chief Justice delivered it. "Perhaps no judicial proceedings in this country ever involved more important consequences, ... than the case of Dartmouth College."[773]
Important, indeed, were the "consequences" of the Dartmouth decision. Everywhere corporations were springing up in response to the necessity for larger and more constant business units and because of the convenience and profit of such organizations. Marshall's opinion was a tremendous stimulant to this natural economic tendency. It reassured investors in corporate securities and gave confidence and steadiness to the business world. It is undeniable and undenied that America could not have been developed so rapidly and solidly without the power which the law as announced by Marshall gave to industrial organization.
One result of his opinion was, for the period, of even higher value than the encouragement it gave to private enterprise and the steadiness it brought to business generally; it aligned on the side of Nationalism all powerful economic forces operating through corporate organization. A generation passed before railway development began in America; but Marshall lived to see the first stage of the evolution of that mighty element in American commercial, industrial, and social life; and all of that force, except the part of it which was directly connected with and under the immediate influence of the slave power, was aggressively and most effectively Nationalist.
That this came to be the fact was due to Marshall's Dartmouth opinion more than to any other single cause. The same was true of other industrial corporate organizations. John Fiske does not greatly exaggerate in his assertion that the law as to corporate franchises declared by Marshall, in subjecting to the National Constitution every charter granted by a State "went farther, perhaps, than any other in our history toward limiting State sovereignty and extending the Federal jurisdiction."[774]