Excerpt from A Treatise on the Law of Public Contracts In the leisure hours which fell to my lot in the occupancy of public office, I undertook to gather notes upon the law of Public Contracts. The practice of my profession had brought me in close contact with this phase of the law in representing contractors for subways, railroads, reservoirs, roads, and other public works. I appreciated from experience the difficulty of ascertaining the law affecting this subject and set to work in idle hours to codify it somewhat for my own benefit. As I proceeded with my work if occurred to me that no book had been written on the law of Public Contracts and so I entered upon the task of gathering together for the benefit of the profession all of the principles relating to the subject. I have done this largely in the hope that this work might prove a vade mecum for counsel to governmental bodies, municipal corporations, and public contractors. The method by which I proceeded, wherever this was possible, was to state the general principle affecting the particular subject in hand, then to state the subsidiary principles or exceptions to the rule, and lastly to illuminate these, when possible, by appropriate illustrations. In the examination of thousands of cases I have selected those best illustrating the text and have not attempted to weigh down the footnotes by excessive citation. With very few exceptions every case cited is a public contract case. The work does not include the subject of governmental or municipal bonds. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.