Stanley Matthews

“ The legislature shall pass general laws whereby any number of persons associated for mining, manufacturing, insuring, or other purpose useful to the public, excepting banks of circulation and the construction of works of internal improvement, may become a corporation, on complying with the terms and conditions thereby prescribed; and no special act incorporating or granting peculiar privileges to any joint-stock company or association, not having in view the issuing of bills to circulate as money or the construction of some work of internal improvement, shall be passed. ”

“ No charter of incorporation shall be granted under such general laws, unless the right be reserved to alter or amend such charter at the pleasure of the legislature, to be declared by general laws. No act to incorporate any bank of circulation or internal improvement company, or to confer additional privileges on the same, shall be passed, unless public notice of the intended application for such act be given under such regulations as shall be prescribed by law.'
The incorporation of the plaintiff in error comes within the provisions, both of the constitution and the Code of 1868. ”

“ It was legislating in reference to enterprises already undertaken, prosecuted, and completed by companies originally thus incorporated, and who, by reason of insolvency, had been stripped of their property by creditors, and sentenced by the law to dissolution; and the purpose of the statute was simply to provide suitable means of incorporating the purchasers, to facilitate their use of the property in operating it for the benefit of the public, as designed from the beginning. ”

“ That ct did not, by its terms, create a corporation, but authorized a future organization under it. It ceded to the company, when constituted and certified as thereinafter provided, 'all the rights, interest, and privileges, of whatsoever kind, in and to the Covington & Ohio Railroad, and appurtenances thereunto belonging, now the property of the state of West Virginia, upon condition that it shall within six months after its incorporation, as provided in the tenth section of the act, commence, and within six years complete, equip, and operate a railroad,' etc., as therein described ”