5. The Governor shall appoint three commissioners, and they or either of them shall review and examine the condition of the road once in six months, and report its condition to the Governor.
6. The company, on the completion of the road, is required to report to the Governor that the road has been completed in accordance with the charter requirements.
7. Thereupon, the commissioners are to view and examine the road, and if they report to the Governor that the road has been completed in accordance with the true intent and meaning of the charter, the Governor will then issue a license to the company, permitting it to erect gates and collect toll.
8. The toll that shall be demanded and received from the various kinds of vehicles, live stock, footmen, etc., is prescribed by the charter.
9. It provides that, if any person shall sustain any damage on account of being detained by the keepers of said turnpikes, or on account of the road being out of repair, such person shall have an action against the company for the damages sustained.
10. It fixes the compensation of the commissioners at two dollars per day while necessarily employed, which shall be paid by the corporation.
11. It requires the road to be completed on or before the first day of September, 1802, in default of which all rights granted by the charter are forfeited.
This charter takes up one page and two-thirds of another page of the acts as published, and is embodied, caption and all, in eighty-one printed lines; and yet almost every conceivable phase of the questions which have arisen between the people and such corporations, to annoy both and vex courts and general assemblies, are fully covered in this short charter, either in specific words, terms and provisions, or in the true intent and meaning of the whole.
Some features of this charter deserve more than a passing notice. One, which limited the life of the corporation to ten years, is in keeping with and conformity to the great doctrine announced in the twenty-third paragraph of the “declaration of rights” appended to and adopted as part of the state constitution in 1796, that “perpetuities and monopolies are contrary to the genius of a free state, and shall not be allowed”: therefore they limited the life of this “monopoly” to ten years. As private citizens, the men who composed the general assembly believed in this doctrine; and, as representatives of the people, they stuck to it with a firmness and manliness worthy to be followed by all future legislative bodies.
Another feature of this second charter, which should have commended it as a model in form and substance to future general assemblies, is the retention in its face of the right and power of the state to regulate and control the road, in its condition with reference to the safety of the travelling public, and the services to be rendered and the charges to be made therefor, as well as to require the corporation to pay the agents of the people, who were to supervise and regulate it in these particulars.