Page:United States Reports, Volume 209.djvu/385

 YAZOO'& MISSISSIPPI R. R. . VICKSBURG.' 359. 2 U.S. Argm for Apllaat. the railroad charter provision which formed the subject of con- trovemy in Railroad Company v. Adams, 77 Mississippi, 194, affirmed by this court, 180 U.S. 1. It does not fall within sec. 13, Art. 12 of the Mississippi constitution of 1869, nor within the decision of those cases, for the reason that it does not undertake to create an exemption such as is by them con- demned. The effect of the act of 1884, and its only effect as to this, is to empower the city of Vicksburg to contract for the loca- tion of the machine shops within its limits, .and in and by such contract, if the municipal authorities should deem it to the interest of the city, to extend as a consideration, an exemption from municipal taxation. But such exemption, when ex- tended, was to be and could only be, the act of the city, and not the act of the legislature. The exemption is conditioned upon and only exists so long as the shops are/naintained upon the property. It was not by the legislature designed to be, and it was not, the grant of an exemption to the railroad company, but it was the grant of a certain power to the city. In fact nothing was thereby granted to the company; because as to this, the company itself, and for its own part, had already the power to make such a contract. The contract of 1884 was validly made under the act of 1884, a constitutional law; and it therefore was beyond the power of the State to repeal, by either statute or constitution. The recognition of this proposition pervaded the entire litigation U.S., the entire controversy in them being either that the exemption was void ab initio because of the constitution of 1869, or else that it was lost by the consolidation of 1892, which created a new company, subject in all things to the con- stitution of 1890 and the code of 1892; in short an abandon- ment v81untarily made. The contract was made under the law; and whatever might be the lesses of the railroad companies, in a general way, by

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