that his or her part of his estate should be divided among the survivors. Held, that the trust for the daughters' shares applies to the three shares of his wife's estate as well as of the testator's own estate. Rawle's Appeal. Opinion by Trunkey, J. [Decided April 21, 1884.] BAILMENT-FRAUD-AGENCY.-A., an insolvent, entered into an agreement with B. to carry on his business, which was that of a currier, as B.'s agent, and so held himself out to the world, bought leather, made it up, sold it, and then paid B. one cent per pound more than it was bought for. In a contest between a former creditor of A. and B. as to the goods, held, that the question whether A. was B.'s agent was properly submitted to the jury, there being no other evidence of fraud. Spanogle v. Doane. Opinion per Curiam. [Decided April 21, 1884.] ASSESSMENT PAYMENT UNDER PROTEST.-Where houses are erected on a private street in the city of Philadelphia, which has not been adopted by the city, and in which no water-pipe has been laid, the granting of a permit to connect with a water-main on an adjacent street is discretionary with the water department, and may be prohibited, unless a frontage assessment is paid for water-pipe to be afterward laid when the street is dedicated. Where under such circumstances plaintiff paid the frontage tax under protest, and afterward testified that the money was paid as a deposit, to be held in case the city should by ordinance direct a pipe to be laid. Held, this was not such an involuntary payment as would entitle plaintiff to recover the money back, until at least the city has had a reasonable time to lay down the pipe, and that demand should have been made to have the same laid down prior to the institution of a suit to recover the sum paid. Boswell v. City of Philadelphia. Opinion by Sterrett, J. [Decided Feb. 4, 1884.] WILL-HEIRS AND NEXT OF KIN-HUSBAND.-A testator in a will, which was distinguished throughout by strict legal accuracy in the use of terms, devised certain real estate in fee and bequeathed certain personalty absolutely to trustees in trust for his daughters for life, with a testamentary power of appointment to each over her share of his estate. In default of the exercise of such power he provided that the share of a deceased daughter should go to her children and issue. "In default of such will and child and children or issue of such, then" the testator directed "the principal shall go to the heirs or next of kin of the daughter so dying as provided by the intestate laws of Pennsylvania." Held, that the testator, having in apt and proper terms devised and bequeathed property to the "heirs and next of kin" of a daughter dying without children or issue, and without exercising her power of appointment, could not be deemed to have meant by those terms distributees under the intestate law, and that therefore the husband of a daughter so dying had no interest in such property. This doctrine is illustrated in various forms and circumstances in Patterson v. Hawthorn, 12 S. & R. 112; Buckley v. Reed, 3 Harr. 83; Gibbons v. Fairlamb, 2 Cas. 217; Eby's Appeal, 3 Norr. 241, and other cases. The cases however do not at all conflict with those of the other class which hold that where technical words are used, and there is a subject to which they may apply, the technical meaning must prevail. Thus in Clark v. Scott, 17 P. F. S. 446, where a testamentary disposition was made quite similar to the one we are considering, this rule was strictly applied. On page 451, Sharswood, J., said: "The testator, Thomas P. Ash, after devising his residuary estate, real and personal, to several per sons, declared that in case of the death of either of them before him the devise or bequest should not lapse, but shall go to,and be taken by the heirs, executors, or administrators of said legatees or devisees so dying, in the same manner as if the same had been specifically devised.'" He was evidently aware of the distinction between real and personal estate. He has used throughout his will the words legally appropriate to each. All his legacies of mere personalty are by the words "give and bequeath," but when he comes to the residuary clause in which he blends both his real and personal estate, he is careful to use the words "give, devise, and bequeath," and adds a limitation to "heirs, executors, administrators, and assigns." We may infer then that in the substituted gift for the lapsed devise the word "heirs" was used in none other than its legal technical meaning. Apart however from this very important assistance at arriving at the true intention of the author of the disposition, it is a canon of construction settled in many cases, that the word "heirs" shall receive its appropriate technical sense, unless there is some language or expression which shows that it was used in the broader and more popular sense." Other illustrations of this ruling are found in Ralston v. Waln, 8 Wr. 279; Por ter's Appeal, 9 id. 201; and Eby's Appeal in Wisler's Est., 14 id. 311. Ivin's Appeal. Opinion by Green, J. [Decided April 28, 1884.] EIGN FINANCIAL LAW. NEGOTIABLE INSTRUMENT-ASSIGNMENT OF, BY FOREXECUTOR—ASSIGNEE MAY SUE.-A party to whom an executor appointed by a will duly probated in another State, but not probated in this State, has assigned a promissory note in accordance with a bequest in such will, may maintain an action on the note against the payee in this State. It does not appear whether or not the decedent was indebted to any resident of this State. It is insisted that a foreign executor can not maintain an action in the courts of this State. For the purposes of this case this will be conceded; and this being done, it is further insisted that for the same reason the assignee of such an executor cannot maintain such an action. Counsel cite and rely on Thompson v. Wilson, 2 N. H. 292; Stearns v. Burnham, 5 Me. 261; Dial v. Gary, 14 S. C. 573; S. C., 37 Am. Rep. 737. These cases sustain the proposition above stated. The reasoning upon which they are based largely is that the authority of an executor is limited to the State in which he was appointed, and that every State should prevent the removal of the property of an estate until it has been determined there are no creditors citizens of the State who are entitled to have such property appropriated to the payment of the indebtedness due them in accordance with the laws of the State in which they reside. There are authorities which announce a different rule, and it has been held that a foreign executor may assign a promissory note, and that his assignee may maintain an action thereon in the courts of a State other than that in which the executor was appointed. Harper v. Butler, 2 Pet. 239; Wilkins v. Ellett, 108 U. S. 256; Rand v. Hubbard, 4 Metc. 252; Peterson v. Chemical Bank, 32 N. Y. 21; Owen v. Moody, 29 Miss. 79; Story Conf. Laws, § 359. The reason upon which these cases are based mainly is that the title to promissory notes belonging to an estate vest in the executor, and that he can do what the decedent could have done in his lifetime; that is, assign the note so as to vest the title in his assignee, so as to enable him, as such owner, to maintain an action thereon against the maker in the courts of any State in which the latter resides. This seems to us to be the better view, and we therefore adopt it, deeming it unnecessary to state at greater length the reasoning upon which the cited cases are based. Sup. Ct., Iowa, Oct. 8, 1884. Campbell v. Brown. Opinion by Seevers, J. [20 N. W. Rep. 745; see 26 Eng. Rep. 16.] tion is groundless. Before the passing of the Judicature Act of 1873, as the Courts of Oyer and Terminer and Gaol Delivery were not parts of the Queen's Bench, it was necessary that the Queen's Bench should issue its writ to bring before it the record, not to its own but to another court. But by the 16th section of 36 and 37 Vict., ch. 66, these courts are now made part of the High Court, and their jurisdiction is vested LORD CHIEF JUSTICE COLERIDGE'S OPINION IN in it. The order of the court has been made to bring THE" MIGNONETTE" CASE. THE two prisoners, Thomas Dudley and Edwin Stephens, were indicted for the murder of Richard Parker on the high seas, on the 25th of July in the present year. They were tried before my brother Huddleston at Exeter on the 6th of November, and under the direction of my learned brother the jury returned a special verdict, the legal effect of which has been argued before us, and on which we are now to pronounce judgment. The special verdict, after certain objections by Mr. Collins, to which the attorney-general yielded, as it is finally settled before us, is as follows: (His lordship then read the finding of the jury, and continued.) From these facts, stated with the cold precision of a special verdict, it appears sufficiently that the prisoners were subjected to terrible temptation, to sufferings which might break down the bodily powers of the strongest man, and try the conscience of the best. Other details yet more harrowing, facts yet more loathsome and appalling, were presented to the jury, and are to be found recorded in my learned brother's notes. But this nevertheless is clear -that the prisoners put to death a weak and unoffending boy upon the chance of preserving their own lives by feeding upon his flesh and blood after he was killed, and with the certainty of depriving him of any possible chance of survival. The verdict finds in terms that if the men had not fed upon the body of the boy they probably would not have survived, and that the boy being in a much weaker condition, was likely to have died before them. They might possibly have been picked up next day by a passing ship; they might possibly not have been picked up at all; in either case it is shown that the killing of the boy would have been an unnecessary and profitless act. It is found by the verdict that the boy was incapable of resistance, and in fact made none. And it is not even suggested that his death was due to any violence on his part, attempted or even so much as feared against those who killed him. Under these circumstances, the jury say they are ignorant whether those who killed him were guilty of murder, and have referred it to this court to say what is the legal consequence which follows from the facts which they have found. Certain objections on points of form were taken by Mr. Collins before he came to argue the main point in the case. First, it was contended that the conclusion of the special verdict as entered on the record, to the effect "that this jury find their verdict in accordance with the judgment of this court," was not put to them by my learned brother, and that its forming part of the verdict on the record invalidated the whole verdict. But the answer is twofold-first, that it is really what the jury meant, and that it is the clothing in legal phraseology of that which is already contained by necessary implication in their unquestioned finding; and secondly, that it is a matter of the purest form, and that it appears from the precedents with which we have been furnished from the Crown Office that this has been the form of special verdicts in crown cases for upwards of a century at least. Next it was objected that the record should be brought into this court by certiorari, and that in this case no writ of certiorari had issued. The fact is so, but the objec the record from one part of the court into this cham. ber, which is another part of the same court. The record is here in obedience to that order; and we are all of opinion that the objection fails. It was further objected that according to the decision of the majority of the judges in the Franconia case there was no jurisdiction in the court at Exeter to try these prisoners. But in that case the prisoner was a German, who had committed the alleged offense as captain of a German ship. These prisoners were English seamen, the crew of an English yacht cast away in a storm on the high seas, escaping from her in an open boat. The opinion of the minority in the Franconia case has been since not only declared but enacted by Parliament to have been the law, and 17 and 18 Vict., ch. 104, § 267, is absolutely fatal to this objection. We are all therefore of opinion that this objection likewise must be overruled. There remains to be considered the real question in the case, whether killing under the circumstances set forth in the verdict be or be not murder. The contention that it could be any thing else was, to the minds of us all, both new and strange, and we stopped the attorney-general in his negative argument that we might hear what could be said in support of a proposition which appeared to us to be at once dangerous, immoral, and opposed to all legal principle and analogy. All no doubt that can be said has been urged before us, and we are now to consider and determine what it amounts to. First, it is said that it follows from various definitions of murder in books of authority, which definitions imply, if they do not state the doctrine that in order to save your own life you may lawfully take the life of another when that other is neither attempting nor threatening yourself, nor is guilty of any illegal act whatever. But if these definitions be looked at they will not be found to sustain that contention. The earliest in point of date is the passage cited to us from Bracton, who wrote in the reign of Henry III. It was at one time the fashion to discredit Bracton, as Mr. Reeve tells us, because he was supposed to mingle too much of the canonist and civilian with the common lawyer. There is now no such feeling, but the passage upon homicide on which reliance is placed is a remarkable example of the kind of writing which may explain it. Sin and crime are spoken of as apparently equally illegal, and the crime of murder, it is expressly declared, may be committed, lingua vel facto; so that a man, like Hero Done to death by slanderous tongues, would, it seems, in the opinion of Bracton, be a person in respect of whom might be grounded a legal indictment for murder. But in that very passage, as to the necessity on which reliance has been placed, it is clear that Bracton is speaking of necessity in the ordinary sense, the repelling by violence, justified, so far as it was necessary for the object, any illegal violence used toward oneself. It is, if possible, yet clearer that the doctrine contended for receives no support from the great authority of Lord Hale. It is plain that in his view the necessity which justified homicide is that which has always been and is now considered justification. "In all these cases," says he, "of homicide by necessity, as in the pursuit of a felon, in killing him that assaults to rob, or comes to burn or break the house, or the like, which are in themselves no felony." 1 Hale P. C. 4 and 91. Again he says, "that the necessity which justifies homicide is of two kinds-first, the necessity which is of a private nature; second, the necessity which relates to the public justice and safety. The first is that necessity which obligeth a man to his own defense and safeguard, and this takes in inquiries, first, what may be done for the safeguarding of a man's own life?" Then follow three other heads, not necessary to pursue. Lord Hale proceeds: "As touching the first of these, namely, homicide in defense of a man's own life, which is usually styled se defendendo," it is not possible to use words more clear to show that Lord Hale regarded the private necessity which justifies, and alone justifies, the taking the life of another for the safeguarding of one's own to be what is commonly called self-defense. But if this could be even doubtful upon Lord Hale's words, Lord Hale himself has made it clear. For first, in the chapter in which he deals with the exemption created by compulsion or necessity, he thus expresses himself: "If a man be desperately assaulted and in peril of death, and cannot otherwise escape, unless to satisfy his assailant's fury he will kill an innocent person then present, the fear and actual force will not acquit of the crime and punishment of murder if he commit the act, for he ought rather to die himself than to kill an innocent. But if he cannot otherwise save his own life, the law permits him in his own defense to kill the as. sailant, for by the violence of the assault and the offense committed upon him by the assailant himself, the law of nature and necessity hath made him his own protector-" cum debito moderamine inculpatæ tutela." Hale P. C. 51. But further still, Lord Hale in the following chapter deals with the position asserted by the casuists and sanctioned, as he says, by Grotius and Puffendorf, that in a case of extreme necessity either of hunger or clothing, theft is no theft, or at least not punishable as theft, and some even of our own lawyers have asserted the same. "But," says Lord Hale, "I take it that here in England that rule, at least by the laws of England, is false; and therefore if a person being under necessity for want of victuals or clothes shall upon that account clandestinely and animo furandi steal another man's goods, it is a felony and a crime by the laws of England punishable with death. Hale P. C. 1 and 54. If Lord Hale therefore is clearas he is that the extreme necessity of hunger does not justify larceny, what would he have said to the doctrine that it would have justified murder? It is satisfactory to find that another great authority, second probably only to Lord Hale, speaks with the same unhesitating clearness in this matter. Sir Michael Foster, in the third chapter of his discourse on homicide, deals with the subject of homicide founded in necessity, and the whole chapter implies-and is insensible unless it does imply-that in the view of the writer necessity and self-defense, which he defines as opposing force to force even to the death, are convertible terms. There is no hint, no trace of the doctrine now contended for. The whole reasoning of the chapter is entirely inconsistent with it. In 1 East the whole chapter on "Homicide by Necessity" is taken up with an elaborate discussion of the limits within which necessity, in Sir M. Foster's sense, is a justification or excuse for homicide. There is a short section at the end (very generally and doubtfully expressed), in which the only instance discussed is the well-known One of shipwrecked men on a plank able to sustain only one of them; and the conclusion left by Sir E. East is entirely undetermined. What is true of Sir E. East is also true of Mr. Serjeant Hawkins. The whole of his chapter on "Justifiable Homicide" assumes that the only justifiable homicide of a private nature is in defense against force upon a man's person or his goods. In the 22d section we are told again of the case of two shipwrecked men on a single plank, with this significant declaration from a careful writer, "It is said to be justifiable." So too Dalton clearly considers necessity and self-defense, in Sir Michael Foster's sense of that expression, to be convertible terms, though he gives without comment Lord Bacon's instance of two men on one plank, as a quotation from Lord Bacon, adding nothing. Again Staunforde says the necessity to justify homicide must be inevitable, and the example he gave to illustrate his meaning is the very same which is stated by Dalton, showing that the necessity he was speaking of was a physical necessity and self-defense and defense against physical violence. Russell on Crimes merely repeats the language of the oldest books, and adds no new authority or fresh considerations. Is there then any authority for the proposition presented to us? Among decided cases there is none. The case of the seven English sailors referred to by the commentator of Grotius and Puffendorf has been discovered by a gentleman of the bar, who has communicated with my brother Huddleston, to convey, if it conveys so much, the judgment of a single judge of the Island of St. Kitts, when it was possessed partly by France and partly by this country, somewhere about 1641. It is an event mentioned in a medical treatise published at Amsterdam, and altogether as an authority in an English court is as unsatisfactory as possible. The Ameri can case stated by my brother Stephen in his digest from Wharton on Homicide, in which it was decided, correctly indeed, that sailors had no right to throw passengers overboard to save themselves, but on the ground that the proper mode of determining who was to be sacrificed was to vote on the subject by ballot, can hardly, as my brother Stephen says, be an authority satisfactory to a court in this country. The observations of Lord Mansfield in Rex v. Stratton, striking and excellent as they are, were deliv ered in a political trial where the question was whether a political necessity had arisen for deposing the governor of Madras; but they have little application to the case before us, which must be decided on very different considerations. The one real authority of former times is Lord Bacon, who lays down the law as follows: "Necessity carries privilege in itself. Necessity is of three sorts-necessity of conservation of life, necessity of obedience, and necessity of the act of God, the stronger. First, of the conservation of life, if a man steals viands to satisfy his hunger, there is no felony or larceny; so if divers be in danger of drowning by the casting away of some boat, and one of them gets on the same plank to keep himself above water, and another, to save his life, thrust him from it, whereby he was drowned, this is neither se defendendo nor misadventure, but is justifiable." On this it is to be observed that Lord Bacon's proposition, that stealing to satisfy hunger is no larceny is hardly supported by Staunforde, whom he cites for it, and is expressly contradicted by Lord Hale in the passage already cited; and as for the proposition as to the plank and boat, it is said to be derived from the canonists. At any rate. he cites no authority for it, and it must stand upon his own. Lord Bacon was great, even as a lawyer; but it is permissible to much smaller men, relying upon principle and upon the authority of others, the equals and even the superiors of Lord Bacon as lawyers, to question the soundness of his dictum. There are many conceivable states of things in which it may possibly be true, that if Lord Bacon meant to lay down the broad proposition that a man may save his own life by killing, if necessary, an innocent and unoffending neighbor, it certainly is not law at the present day. There remains the high authority of my brother Ste cessity? By what measure is the comparative value of lives to be measured? Is it to be strength, or intellect, or what? It is plain that the principle leaves to him who is to profit by it to determine the necessity which will justify him in deliberately taking another life to save his own. So spake the fiend, And by the tyrant's plea necessity In this case the weakest, the youngest, the most unresisting was chosen. Was it more necessary to kill him than one of the grown men? The answer must be "no." It is not suggested in this particular case that the deeds were " devilish," but it is quite plain that such principles once admitted might be made the legal cloak for unbridled passion and atrocious crime. There is no safe path for judges to tread, but to ascertain the law to the best of their ability, and to declare it according to their judgment; and if in case the law appears to be too severe on individuals, to leave it to the Sovereign to exercise that prerogative of mercy which the Constitution has intrusted to the hands fittest to dispense it. It must not be supposed, in refusing to admit temptation to be an excuse to crime, it is forgotten how terrible the temptation was here, how awful the suffering, how hard it was in such perils to keep the judgment straight and the conduct pure. We are often compelled to set up standards which we cannot reach ourselves, and to lay down rules which we could not ourselves satisfy; but a man has no right to declare temptation to be an excuse, though he might himself have yielded to it; nor allow compassion for the criminal to change or weaken in any manner the legal definition of the crime. It is therefore our duty to declare that the prisoners' act in this case was willful murder; that the facts as stated in the verdict are no legal justification of the homicide; and to say that in our unanimous opinion they are upon this special verdict guilty of murder. phen, who both in his digest and in his history of the criminal law uses language perhaps wide enough to cover this case; but it does not cover it of necessity, and we have the highest authority for saying that it was not meant to cover it. If it had been necessary we must, with true deference, have differed from him; but it is satisfactory to know that we have probably, at least, arrived at no conclusion in which, if he had been a member of the court, he would have been una~ ble to concur. Neither are we in conflict with any opinion expressed on this subject by the learned persons who formed the commission for preparing the Criminal Code. They say on this subject, "We are not prepared to suggest that necessity should in every case be justification. We are equally unprepared to suggest that necessity should in no case be a defense. We judge it better to leave such questions to be dealt with when, if ever, they arise in practice, by applying the principles of law to the circumstances of the particular case." It would have been satisfactory to us if these eminent persons had told us whether the received definitions of legal necessity were in their judgment correct and exhaustive, and if not, in what way they should be amended. But as it is we have, as they say, to apply the principles of law to the circumstances of this particular case. Now except for the purpose of testing how far the conservation of a man's own life is in all conditions and under all circumstances an absolute, unqualified and paramount duty, we exclude from our consideration all the incidents of war. We are dealing with a case of private homicide, not one imposed on men in the service of their sovereign and in the defense of their country. Now it is admitted that the deliberate killing of this unoffending and unresisting boy was clearly murder, unless the killing can be justitied by some well recognized excuse admitted by the law. It is further admitted that there was in this case no such excuse, unless the killing was justified by what has been called necessity; but the temptation to the act which existed here was not what the law has ever called necessity. Nor is this to be regretted. Although law and morality are not the same, many things may be immoral which are not necessarily illegal; yet the absolute divorce of the law from morality would be a fatal consequence, and such divorce would follow if the temptation to murder in this case were to be held by law an absolute defense of it. It is not so. To preserve one's life is, generally speaking, a duty; but it may be the plainest duty, the highest duty, to sacrifice it. War is full of instances in which it is a man's duty not to live, but to die. It would be a very easy and cheap display of common-place learning to quote from Greek and Latin authors passage after passage in which the duty of dying for others has been laid down in glow-would be exceptionally large. In the first place, busiing and emphatic language as resulting from the principles of heathen ethics. It is enough in a Christian country to remind ourselves of the duty-which we propose to follow-of the duty in case of shipwreck of a captain to his crew, of the crew to the passengers, of soldiers to women and children (as in the noble case of the Birkenhead). These duties impose on men the moral necessity, not of the preservation, but of the sacrifice of their lives for others, from which in no country last of all, it is to be hoped, in England men will not shrink, as indeed they have not shrunk. It is not correct therefore to say that there is an absolute and unqualified necessity to preserve one's life. Necesse est ut eam non ut vivam is a saying quoted by Lord Bacon himself with high eulogy in the very chapter on necessity to which so much reference has been made. It is not needful to point out the awful dauger of admitting the principle which has been contended for. Who is to be the judge of this sort of ne WE OUR LONDON LETTER. E are now arrived at the end of the first portion of the legal year, and in a technical sense the season is not appropriate for retrospect, but for all that there are many external reasons which cause lawyers, like other men, to look back upon the last twelve months, and to give a good or bad character to the year which intervenes between one Christmas and another. Truth to tell, there are not many men at the English bar to whom the retrospective process can be pleasant, and it is much to be feared that if the secrets of the bankers were revealed the list of diminished incomes ness is undoubtedly weaker than it has been before within the memory of living man. The courts indeed are hard at work still, but there has been a great lack of substantial cases, and the men who made haudsome profits upon the London sittings in former times now complain sadly. The fact is that the city merchants prefer the rough justice of a lay arbitrator, which may be obtained without delay, to the costly and tedious process of squeezing a decision out of the courts of justice. Ere long there is a prospect courts of arbitration will be systematically established in which legal assistance will be carefully eschewed. Upon this point there is not any serious ground for alarm, your correspondent believes, because on the whole, a lawyer is considerably clearer in statement and explanation than a layman. Moreover cross-examination is the best kind of machinery for eliciting truth, and there is no need to remind lawyers that the art of cross-examination is both delicate and difficult of acquisition. Plaintiffs in person have been the plague of the year; The plaintiff declined the proposal, made a violent they waste time, they insult the judges, and worst of speech, and gave his evidence. The eminent advocates all, they win their suits. Mr. Bradlaugh indeed ar- who appeared for the defendant did not cross-examgues as well as any man at the bar, but then he is prac-ine, and offered no evidence, expecting apparently that tically a specialist in his own particular department of Manisty, J., would rule that the letter was privileged. law. He has given particular study to an abstruse What actually happened was that the judge told the subject. He is infinitely respectful, and in fact a law-jury that the letter was privileged unless there was yer in every thing except name. But there is the terrible Mrs. Weldon, who bandies courtesies with the Court of Appeal, defies poor Mr. Justice Wills, and schools the frowning Mr. Justice Stephen in the rules of polite society. Some excellent rhymes have lately appeared with reference to this good lady's courses of action: "Condemned by Minos's decrees,. You ridicule the awful Cretan, With every fact contained in Seton; motive, and the jury having expressly found motive, overruled the verdict on the ground that there was no evidence by which it could be sustained. The result was an universal chorus of disapprobation from the press and in society, and although there is a certain diversity of opinion on the point, the profession on the whole is inclined to join in the strain. Manisty, J., made matters worse by explaining that he had often done the same thing before in order to save expense. This every one knew, and in ordinary cases a certain effect in this direction may be produced; but here we have the plaintiff appealing to the Court of Appeal against the judgment, and the defendant moving for a new trial in the Divisional Court on the ground that the verdict was against the weight of the evidence. Prudence too ought to have warned Manisty, J., that a case in which so great a personage as the Lord Chief Justice was concerned could not be treated like an ordinary case. And after all, where is the logic of the course adopted? What is the sense of saying to a jury "Find for or against express malice," and then saying "There was no evidence upon which you could come to such a conclusion." The Mignonette case was a solemn and sensational farce. A shipwrecked crew killed and ate one of their number on the high seas, She has had a succession of victories of late, having persuaded a jury to disregard Wood v. Leadbitter, 13 M. & W.-somehow or other juries do not think highly of ancient authorities-and having beguiled the Court of Appeal into a declaration that under the two Married Women's Property Acts (1870, 1882), a man may commit trespass in entering the house of a married woman, even by command of her husband, if that house happens to be her separate property. The first success is a matter for congratulation, for the case will go higher, and it is quite time that Wood v. Lead-without casting lots or obtaining his consent. Was bitter, which decides that a mere license is revocable at will, because no irrevocable interest in land can be transferred otherwise than by grant, should be reconsidered. It is correct enough in point of law, no doubt, but it is as unjust as possible, for it means that if A. pays half a guinea for a seat at the Lyceum Theater, and B. offers the lessee fifty guineas for the seat, because he wishes to see and hear Miss Mary Anderson, the lessee may forcibly expel A., who can only recover damages for breach of contract. Meanwhile there is a definite reason for Mrs. Weldon's successes, and a lesson for the bar in that reason. She knows that eloquence touches the jury man's heart, and she uses every art of oratory, appealing to sympathy and to common sense. She first affects their feelings, and then flatters their vanity, and finally wins the day. Now at the bar the practice of eloquence is rare, except in criminal cases, and the language and style of the best advocates is woefully slipshod. Yet one would have thought that the experience of criminal courts was an ever-present testimonial to the value of decla mation. I have heard Mr. Montague Williams or Mr. Charles Matthews ask in thundering tones, "What motive-what motive, I repeat could the unfortunate prisoner have had?" and the jury, notwithstand ing the fact that the motive was perfectly obvious, have acquitted men of manifest larcenies. there needed a special verdict in order to discover whether this was murder or not? It would have been equally murder if lots had been cast, or if the consent of the victim had been obtained, but the moral guilt of the murderers would have been less. Voila tout, and a good many people fail to see why Baron Huddleston should not have laid down the law in these terms to the jury in Devonshire. These reactionary methods of trial produce strange results, and show the error of confusing ancient and modern practice. Thus in another instance Mr. Bradlaugh, unsuccessful in pleading his case in his trial at bar, was compelled to move for a new trlal before the very same judges by whom he had been tried. Two great trials demand attention, the first being Adams v. Coleridge; the second the Mignonette case. I take it that the facts of the first case are familiar to your readers, but they may be stated very shortly. The Hon. Bernard Coleridge, finding that his sister intended to marry one Mr. Adams, wrote her a letter, which was the reverse of complimentary to her aud to her fiancé. Upon this the abused gentleman brought an action for libel, and again as plaintiff in person, occupied the attention of the court for two full days or thereabouts. From the beginning he was unkindly treated by the judge, Manisty, J., who opened the ball by hurling at his head a suggestion that the case should be referred to an eminent person and heard in private. The last news is that the official receivers have suffered a grievous defeat, and that the solicitor general has announced that various details in the bankruptcy machinery are under consideration with a view toward alteration. What happened will have a peculiar interest to absconding bankrupts, of whom, I take it, there are several in the States. Messrs. Parker & Parker, solicitors, failed and fled. On the very day of their adjudication the official receiver put their property up for sale without consulting the creditors. Seeing that the object of the act is, inter alia, to secure to creditors the management of the estate of a debtor, this was a little arbitrary, and the official receiver is ordered to refund the fees at six per cent, which he took for realizing the estate; that is to say, for his trouble in ordering an auctioneer to put it up for sale. This first check to the operation of a statute ruinous to lawyers is naturally a subject of gleeful comment, and evidently was highly displeasing to their excellencies from the board of trade office, who were present in considerable numbers. The decision of the board in the matter of altering the fees is also welcome, and if alterations are judiciously carried out, good results may ensue, for it is the general belief that the machinery of the Bankruptcy Act is good enough, and that an amendment of detail may convert it into an effectual measure. present creditors, debtors and practitioners are equally At |