credit transactions current in the usage of the
business community for the purpose of investment :
. the old-fashioned loan, the usage of which has
101'^ come down from an earlier day ; and the stock
ii (J J share, whereby funds are invested in a joint stock
JtP I company or corporation. The latter is a credit
(H instrument, so far as touches the management of
the property represented, in that {in earlier usage
at least) it effects a transfer of a given body of
property from the hands of an owner who resigns
discretion in its control to a board of directors who
assume the management of it. In addition to
these two methods of credit relation there haa,
during the late-modem industrial period, come
into extensive use a third class of expedients, viz.
debentures of one form and another — bonds of
various tenor, preferred stock, preference shares,
ete., ranging, in point of technical character and
degree of liability, from something approaching the
nature of a bill of sale to something not readily