bonds of the said railway company for the purpose of building the railway thereof, and said money shall be applied and used in the construction of said railway, its buildings, equipments, and necessary appurtenances, and for no other purpose. The commissioners respectively, in the corporate name of each of their said townships, towns, or cities, shall subscribe for and purchase bonds of said railway company to the amount that they severally may have borrowed as aforesaid."

After providing that the commissioners shall execute their official bonds, with security to be approved by the judge (all of which was done in this case), and that they shall be a board to act for their respective townships, towns, and cities, with power, by a majority, to do any business authorized by the act, the twelfth and fourteenth sections declare:

"SECT. 12. That all bonds issued in accordance with the provisions of this act shall be registered in the office of the county in which the township, town, or city so issuing is situated, and the words 'registered in the county clerk's office' shall be printed or written across the face of each bond, attested by the signature of the county clerk when so registered, and no bonds shall be valid unless so registered."

"SECT. 14. That in case any new township, town, or city shall have been created, or the boundaries of any township, town, or city shall have been enlarged on the routes of the said railway, or at the termini thereof, so that there is no assessment roll for the year 1867 for such township, town, or city so created or enlarged, the said commissioners for such new or enlarged township, town, or city shall cause to be prepared an assessment roll for the purposes of this act, by extracting from any assessment roll or rolls for said year all that relates to any assessment of persons or property in the territory embraced in the said new township, town, or city so enlarged or created, or in said enlargement."

On the fifteenth day of April, 1868, the legislature of New Jersey passed another act, the provisions of which are important. It is entitled "An Act to set off from the township of Bloomfield, in the county of Essex, a new township, to be called the Township of Montclair." The first section defines the boundary of the new township, and the second constitutes its inhabitants a body politic and corporate in law by the name of

"The inhabitants of the township of Montclair," with all the rights, powers, privileges, and advantages, and subject to all the regulations, government, and liabilities to which the inhabitants of the other townships in said county of Essex are or may be entitled or subject by the laws of the State.

The third section, after prescribing the time and place at which the first town meeting of Montclair should be held, and that the voting thereat should be by ballot until otherwise determined by law, declares :

"That all the provisions and restrictions of an act entitled 'An Act to authorize the inhabitants of the several townships of this State to vote by ballot at their town meetings,' approved March twenty-second, eighteen hundred and sixty, and of the supplements thereto, shall apply to the inhabitants of the said township of Montclair, and all acts and parts of acts in force in the said township of Bloomfield at the time of the passage of this act are hereby extended to and shall be in force in the said township of Montclair, but the provisions of any act or acts from the operation of which the township of Bloomfield has, by any proviso or exception contained therein, been specially excepted, shall apply to and be in force in said township of Montclair from and after the time this act shall go into effect, the same as if the township of Bloomfield had not been specially excepted therein."

Mr. William M. Evarts and Mr. Thomas N. McCarter for the plaintiff in error.

Mr. John F. Dillon and Mr. Rastus S. Ransom for the defendant in error.

MR. JUSTICE HARLAN delivered the opinion of the court, and, after stating the foregoing facts, proceeded as follows:

In behalf of the township of Montclair it is contended that the bonds and coupons in suit were executed and issued without legislative authority, and, consequently, are not enforceable. This proposition, being fundamental in the case, will be first considered.

It has been observed that the first section of the act of April 9, 1868, the one referred to in the bonds, expressly excepts from its operation the township of Bloomfield. The Circuit Court was of opinion, and so ruled, that Montclair; upon

being set off from Bloomfield Township, and made a separate municipal corporation, with all the rights, powers, and privileges of other townships in the same county, was no longer embraced in the exception of Bloomfield Township made by the act of April 9, 1868, but, as a distinct independent body politic and corporate, became entitled, in virtue of the fourteenth section of that act (and without reference to the proviso in the third section of the act of April 15, 1868), to take advantage of all the provisions of the original or bonding act. Some of the members of this court prefer not to rest the determination of the question of legislative authority upon that interpretation of the original act. But we are of opinion that the proviso of the third section of the act creating the township of Montclair declaring in force, as to that township, "the provisions of any act or acts from the operation of which the township of Bloomfield has by any proviso or exception contained therein been specially excepted"- must be construed as taking Montclair out of the exception in the first section of the act of April 9, 1868, and adding it to the class of townships which, by that act, were authorized to raise money upon bonds, to be invested in bonds of the railway company. Thenceforward, the township of Bloomfield, within the meaning of the act of April 9, 1868, embraced only such territory and inhabitants as remained after Montclair Township was set off as an independent municipality. The recital in the bonds that they were issued in pursuance of that act must therefore be taken as referring to it, as enlarged or extended by the act of April 15, 1868.

It is the duty of the court to give effect, if possible, to every clause and word of a statute, avoiding, if it may be, any construction which implies that the legislature was ignorant of the meaning of the language it employed. We should assume that the legislature was aware, when the act of April 15, 1868, was passed, that a previous statute had expressly excepted Bloomfield Township from all of its provisions. When, therefore, they declared that the new township should come under the operation of any act from which Bloomfield had been specially excepted by any proviso thereof, the established canons of statutory construction require us to presume that the legislature understood the full legal effect of such a declaration. The pur

pose, manifestly, was to relieve the new township from the disabilities imposed by the bonding act upon the township of Bloomfield as then established.

This would close the discussion of the question of legislative authority, but for another proposition which counsel have pressed with great earnestness. They insist that this construction of the act of April 15, 1868, brings it, or so much thereof as constitutes its third section, in conflict with sect. 7 of art. 4 of the New Jersey Constitution, which declares that "to avoid improper influences which may result from intermixing in one and the same act such things as have no proper relation to each other, every law shall embrace but one object, and that shall be expressed in the title." The argument is not simply that the authority given by the act of April 9, 1868, to issue township bonds in aid of the Montclair Railway Company (which authority we have seen is imported into the act of April 15, 1868), is an object distinct and separate from others embraced by the Montclair Township act, but that such object is not expressed in the title of the latter act.

The purpose of this constitutional provision was declared by the Supreme Court of New Jersey in State v. Town of Union, 33 N. J. L. 350, to be "to prevent surprise upon legislators by the passage of bills, the object of which is not indicated by their titles, and also to prevent the combination of two or more distinct and unconnected matters in the same bill." Further, said the court: "It is not intended to prohibit the uniting in one bill of any number of provisions having one general object fairly indicated by its title. The unity of the object must be sought in the end which the legislative act proposes to accomplish. The degree of particularity which must be used in the title of an act rests in legislative discretion, and is not defined by the Constitution. There are many cases where the object might with great propriety be more specifically stated, yet the generality of the title will not be fatal to the act, if by fair intendment it can be connected with it." The case in which these remarks occurred involved the constitutionality of an act entitled "An Act to amend an act to incorporate the town of Union, in the township of Union, in the county of Hudson, approved March 29, 1864." The body of the act declared

-was not

valid a certain ordinance passed by the town of Union without the formalities required by its charter, but under which a sewer had been constructed. In response to the objection that the object of the act-the construction of sewers expressed in its title, the court said: "The validity of acts with general titles has been so long recognized by our courts, that it cannot be questioned that under the title, 'An Act to incorporate the town of Union,' a government for the town could be established, including taxation for its support, courts for the trial of offenders, authority for laying out streets, building sewers, and making assessments. Under any other rule it would be impossible to organize a city government without a large number of distinct acts. If, under that general title, the formalities for building a sewer and making assessments may be prescribed, there is no reason why a dispensation from the use of the required forms may not be granted by an act entitled 'An Act to amend an act to incorporate the town of Union."" "If this objection," continued the court, "was sustained, it would annul a large portion of the legislation of this State." The doctrines of that case were approved in State v. City of Newark, 34 N. J. L. 236. In the earlier case of Gifford v. New Jersey Railroad Co., 2 Stock. (N. J.) 172, an act supplemental to a former act was sustained upon the ground that the objects of both acts" were parts of the same enterprise, and cannot be said to have any improper relation to each other."

Our attention is called by counsel for the defendant to Rader v. Township of Union, 39 N. J. L. 509, and Pennsylvania Railroad Co. v. National Railway Co., 23 N. J. Eq. 441, 457. But these do not in the slightest degree impinge upon the doctrines of the other cases. Referring, in the Rader case, to the constitutional provision under examination, Chief Justice Beasley observed that its purpose is plainly twofold: "First, to secure a separate consideration for every subject presented for legislative action; second, to insure a conspicuous declaration of such purpose. By the former of these requirements, every subject is made to stand on its own merits, unaffected by improper influences,' which might result from connecting it with other measures having no proper relation to it; and, by the latter, a notice is provided, so that the public,