338 Meyer—Early Railroad Legislation in Wisconsin. 
culiarly significant. Thus, the first charters granted by Maine 
cause a description of the location of the roads to be filed with 
the county commissioners, and provide that the books of the 
company shall be open for inspection by the governor and coun¬ 
cil and by a committee duly authorized b^y the legislature. Quite 
a comprehensive general law was passed in 1841, J one section of 
which has particular interest for us: “No petition for the es¬ 
tablishment of any railroad corporation shall be acted upon, 
unless the same is accompanied and supported by the report of 
a skilful engineer, founded on actual examination of the route 
and by other evidence, showing the character of the soil, the 
manner in which it is proposed to construct such railroad, the 
general profile of the country through which it is proposed to 
be made, the feasibility of the route, and an estimate of the 
probable expense of constructing the same. The petition shall 
set forth the places of beginning and end of the proposed rail¬ 
road, the distance between the same, the general course of said 
railroad, together with the name of five towns through which 
the saftie, on actual survey, may be found to pass.” In New 
York some of the later acts (after 1848) declared the “pub¬ 
lic use of a railroad ” by showing that the undertaking would be 
of “ sufficient utility to justify the taking of private property " 
in pursuance of the general act authorizing the formation of 
railroad companies. Both of these ideas, a technical prospectus 
and the “utility ” of the undertaking as contained in the Maine 
and New York laws respectively, were embodied in the preamble 
of the Liverpool and Manchester Railroad Bill. 1 2 3 The preamble 
of the English bill was subjected to prolonged debates in 1825 
and 1826, and separately voted on in both houses of parliament* 
Only after the preamble had been accepted could the bill itself 
receive consideration. The significance of this is self evident. 
In Prussia a “ memorial ” performs the functions of the English 
preamble. The custom of prefacing a bill with a preamble 
1 Revised Statutes of Maine, Ch. 81. 
2 See Report to the Directors of the Liverpool and Manchester Rail¬ 
road, by James Walker; Am. Ed., Philadelphia, 1831, p. 123ff. 
3 Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates. 
