364 Meyer—Early Railroad Legislation in Wisconsin. 
building in this state, but since the adoption of the constitutional 
amendment it has been impossible for communities to make such 
grievious mistakes. To have judgment taken on bonds with¬ 
out resistance in the courts, and no provision made for paying 
the judgments, because of the sheer inability of the community 
to pay them in full, is no encouraging outlook for any town. 
It can not be a matter of much surprise that people will object 
to being taxed in order to pay off what seems to them an unjust 
debt. No one can ever for a moment show sympathy for re¬ 
fusal to pay an honest debt simply because it may distress the 
debtor. An honest debt must be paid, and refusal to do so is a 
high offense against justice. But no one can long reflect on the 
methods by which individuals and communities were inveigled 
into incurring such debts without being impressed with the 
viciousness and injustice which marked so many of the proceed¬ 
ings. Aid granted by counties seems to have resulted in al¬ 
most every case, in legal controversies'. The feeling of unequal 
benefits derived from the railroad for which the debt had been 
contracted caused much dissatisfaction; and, because of their 
greater size, the same results have been noticed in cases where 
towns in the northern part of the state have extended aid. 1 2 
V. CONSOLIDATION. 
Consolidation had been expressly provided for in several of 
the earlier charters. The provision appears first in a charter 
granted early in 1840. As the same charter imposes duties 
upon ’’county commissioners”—there were no such commis¬ 
sioners in Wisconsin — it is probable that the consolidation 
clause was simply copied, together with the rest of the charter, 
from some eastern model. The consolidation provision appears 
next in a charter granted in 1852, and again in one which fur¬ 
nishes direct internal evidence of eastern origin in its provi¬ 
sions on expropriation. But by 1852 the question of consoli¬ 
dation had become a practical one in a number of states, so 
that even without a more or less conscious act of copying, it is 
probable that Wisconsin railroad promoters would have 
1 Report of Railroad Commissioners, 1875. 
2 Ibid., 1882. 
