REPORT.

The Board of Railroad Commissioners have the honor to submit the following Report:

Chapter 71 of the Resolves of 1870 provided, "That the Board of Railroad Commissioners be, and they hereby are, directed to prepare a codification of the general laws relating to railroads and railroad corporations; * * * and to procure to be printed one thousand copies of the same, which may be distributed at the discretion of said Commissioners." The same Resolve also provided that "analyses, indexes and tables of reference" should be made to the charters and special laws relating to such corporations. The Commissioners have as yet been able to complete only that portion of the work referred to in the Resolve which relates to the general statute law governing railroad corporations, leaving the general law as to horse railways and the indexing, &c., of the special laws to be reported upon at future periods.

Until a very late stage in the preparation of this Report, the Commissioners had intended to include all

general laws in relation to railroads and horse railways in a single report, and in one Act. A more careful examination, however, convinced them that the two subjects should be kept wholly distinct. The second Act, or that relating to horse railways, will, therefore, it is hoped, be ready to be reported by the 20th of February; the remainder of the work directed to be done, relating to charters and special laws, will not be ready for another year.

The accompanying Act is intended, as was stated by the Commissioners in their report for the current year (p. 15), "To present the exact condition of the general railroad laws of the State as they existed at the time of meeting of the present legislature." In only a single case has this rule been departed from. Chapter 351 of the Acts of 1867 was so clearly in its details an exception to the practice now established by section 5 of chapter 408 of the Acts of 1869, that the Commissioners have incorporated a change into the text of the codification (§§ 164-5). This, it is believed, constitutes the only deviation from the rule stated.

Chapter 63 of the General Statutes necessarily constitutes the basis of this codification. The language of that chapter has never been altered, except necessarily in the process of incorporating amendments into its different sections. This general rule has been observed even where the language seemed susceptible

of considerable improvement. Section 132 of this revision is a case in point, where the Commissioners have placed in brackets certain words which might apparently be omitted to advantage. The Acts subsequently passed were drafted with very different degrees of skill. Some did not call for any changes, and others required to be wholly redrafted to make them in any way conform to the concise but simple language of the revision of 1860. Chapters 201 of the Acts of 1860 and 100 of the Acts of 1861 (§§ 39, 161-2) are examples of the latter class. In very many cases some verbal alterations were necessary. Wherever any, the slightest changes, even verbal, have been made, they have been noted immediately under the section in which they occur, so that the remaining work of verification will be very simple.

Probably no chapter of the General Statutes has been altered and supplemented within the last ten years at all in the same degree as chapter 63. It contained 138 sections applicable to steam-railroad corporations. There have been 43 Acts supplementary thereto since passed, containing in all 116 sections. The total number of sections included in all the general Acts relating to railroads was 254. These the Commissioners have reduced to 194. They do not even now feel perfectly confident that no Act or clause of an Act bearing upon railroad corporations has escaped their search; they

have, however, prepared a list of Acts included in this codification, which will make the detection of their omissions by others a comparatively easy task.

The preparation of this Act, even in its present form, has been a work of very considerable labor and delicacy. For reasons already stated, the Commissioners have not felt warranted in taking the necessary liberties with the text to reduce the result of their labors to the smallest compass. They are, however, under the impression that, with a reasonable exercise of discretion, the 194 sections of this Act could without much difficulty be reduced to 175 sections. The legislation of the current year will, even then, probably carry the final enactment up to about 200 sections.

JAMES C. CONVERSE,
EDWARD APPLETON,

CHAS. F. ADAMS, JR.,

Commissioners.

RAILROADS AND RAILROAD CORRPORATIONS.