horn when under way, as required by the act of congress for preventing collisions at sea. "Our rules of navigation," said Mr. Justice Strong in the Supreme Court of the United States, "as well as the British rules, require every steamship when in a fog, 'to go at a moderate speed.' What is such speed may not be precisely definable. It must depend upon the circumstances of each case. That may be moderate and reasonable in some circumstances which would be quite immoderate in others. But the purpose of the requirement being to guard against danger of collisions, very plainly the speed should be reduced as the risk of meeting vessels is increased." Perhaps the worthiest tribute that could be paid to the memory of Justice Beekman, of the Supreme Court, who died yesterday, would be to say - and it truthfully may be said that he was a just and upright judge, whose heart and hands were clean, whose mind was broad and clear, and whose conduct as jurist and citizen adorned our civic institutions. He stood for truth and justice. He loved his fellow man. He upheld the right for its own sake, and in his death the city has lost an individuality whose character disclosed the highest type of American citizenship.-N. Y. Mail and Express. It has long been the custom of the Supreme Court to admit to practice in Michigan attorneys from other States, on presenting certificates of admission from the Supreme Court of the State from which they came, but from this time forward an exception will be made in the case of Indiana. It appears that in that State it is not necessary for a person to graduate at a law school or even pass an examination, except as to moral character, to be admitted; and, therefore, the Supreme Court has ordered that in future all persons presenting certificates from Indiana will be required to submit to an examination, unless holding a diploma from a recognized law school.-Detroit Law Journal. People who cannot understand why they have to pay lawyers good fees for doing what appear to be simple things may note how a puzzling lawsuit developed out of the careless use of the common phrase "more or less." This was a suit brought in California before United States Circuit Judge Morrow, by Wells, Fargo & Co. against William Wolf, to recover from Wolf the difference on 2,925 barrels of cement at $2.56 and at $3.50 per barrel. Wolf contracted to furnish 5.000 barrels of cement more or less," at $2.56 per barrel, to be used in constructing the company's new building. The 5.000 barrels were used up and it was figured that 2,925 additional barrels would be required. By that time the market price had gone up to $3.50, and Wolf declined to furnish more than 500 barrels at the contract price, claiming that that number, being 10 per cent of the number specified in the contract, complied with the phrase "more or less," as used in the contract. Judgment was given in favor of Wells, Fargo & Co. for $2,265, from which, however, was deducted an offset claimed by Wolf which reduced the net judgment against him to $600. And for all the trouble, time, skill and energy in unraveling such an apparently little matter lawyers must be paid.- N. Y. Evening Post. John Proctor Clarke, of New York, whose appointment in place of Mr. Justice Henry R. Beekman, the late Supreme Court justice, has been announced, is the son of Col. J. Edward Clarke, of Washington, D. C., and has long been prominent at the bar of the metropolis. He was assistant corporation counsel during Mayor Strong's administration. He served as counsel for the Fal lows committee, which investigated the affairs of the surrogate's office. With Frank Moss, of the Mazet committee, he was associate counsel when inquiry was made into the administration of the city's departments under Mayor Van Wyck. Gov. Roosevelt appointed Mr. Clarke a deputy attorneygeneral last winter to conduct the investigation of the alleged malicious rumors circulated about the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company. He was president of the West Side Republican Campaign Club in the Roosevelt campaign two years ago, and accompanied Col. Roosevelt on his campaign trips about the State, making many speeches. He has been a member of the Republican county committee and belongs to the Union League Club and the Republican Club of New York. board nuisance was asserted recently by the Court The power of cities to regulate the offensive billof Appeals in deciding, in the case of the city of Rochester v. West (164 N. Y. 510), that the city could regulate the size and character of bill and advertising boards. The city was authorized by its charter to license and regulate bill-posters, billdistributors and sign advertising, and to prescribe the terms and conditions upon which licenses should be granted. In 1896 the common council passed an ordinance forbidding the erection of billboards more than six feet high without the consent of the common council, and providing that every applicant for permission to erect billboards should give one week's notice, in writing, of such application to the owners, occupants or agents of all houses and lots within two hundred feet of the location of the proposed billboard. In 1897 a Rochester bill-posting company erected a billboard without taking any of the foregoing steps and for so doing was fined five dollars. The case, going ultimately to the Court of Appeals, that court decided that the city could regulate the matter to the extent at least of caring for the "safety and welfare of the inhabitants of the city, or persons passing along its streets." On this point the court said: "If the defendant's authority to erect billboards was wholly unlimited as to height and dimensions, they might readily become a constant and continuing danger to the lives and persons of those who should pass along the street in proximity to them." In this connection the court recalled the well-known rule that "the validity of a statute is not to be determined by what has been done in any particular instance, but what may be done under it." The power of a city to regulate the height of billboards on the ground that they menace the safety or "welfare" of citizens seems fairly to support an argument that a city can regulate other features of the billboard nuisance. Certainly the height of many billboards is their least offensive feature. New York Evening Post. English Botes. Subscriptions to the amount of more than £1,000 have already been received or promised toward the memorial of the late Lord Russell, of Killowen, which is to take the form of a statue in the Royal Courts of Justice and a replica of Mr. Sargent's portrait for the National Portrait Gallery. The Palace of Justice in Pretoria was, on the occupation of that city by Lord Roberts, converted into the chief British hospital, and was handed over to the staff of Lord Iveagh's hospital. It has become since the first of November the headquarters of the Transvaal police a force organized by General Baden-Powell. The French law giving faculties to lady barristers is (says the Paris correspondent of the Daily Chronicle) likely to lead to certain changes in feminine garb. The "Mantalinis" and "modistes" are designing Portia-like blouses, while the "toque" in various hues is already seen on the bonnet stands in the inner sanctuaries of the Rue de la Paix. The first woman barrister in France, Mdlle. Chauvin, will, says the St. James' Gazette, make her debut very soon in a lady friend's divorce suit. Mademoiselle Chauvin is a woman of great courage and undoubted ability, who has fought her way to a high place in her profession. She is a fully qualified doctor of law, having received the degree six or seven years ago, chiefly in recognition of a work she has written on "The Professions Accessible to Women." In the Westminster County Court recently, before Judge Lumley Smith, Messrs. Pulvermacher (Lim.), electric belt makers, of Regent street, brought an action for four guineas, the balance of the purchasemoney of an electric belt supplied to Mr. H. Mott, of Oxford. The defendant got into communication with the plaintiffs through an advertisement, and paid one guinea on account of a double concentrated belt. At the time he ordered it he was lowspirited, irritable, and suffered from headache. The belt, in his opinion, made him worse, and he returned it. He maintained that the belt was of no use for the purpose for which it was sent to him. Mr. Mitchell, the managing director of the plaintiff company, said these belts were useful for everything except fever. His honor came to the conclusion that the advertisement was a warranty to cure "all the ills that flesh is heir to." Defendant was not benefited by the belt, and he found in his favor, but did not think it was a case for costs.- Law Journal. Lawyers are plentiful on the stage at present, says the Law Journal. A judge is the leading character in "Mrs. Dane's Defense," at Wyndham's Theatre, a retired judge and a barrister figure in “In the Soup" at the Strand Theatre; a member of the bar is the chief character in The Likeness of the Night," in which Mr. and Mrs. Kendall are now appearing, and a solicitor figures in "Patience," at the Savoy Theatre, whose " make-up" gives him some resemblance to Sir George Lewis. At Kelso, Scotland, Lord Stormonth-Darling recently gave a lecture to the local literary society on "The Art of Public Speaking," from which a passage may be fitly quoted: "My daily duty," said his lordship, "is to listen to speeches from the bar, some of them most able and convincing, others of them less so, and I declare to you it is often a positive pain to me to hear speeches of great ability which are intended to influence my mind or the minds of juries who are sitting with me, absolutely spoiled by ineffective delivery. We judges are supposed to be less liable than a jury or a popular audience to be affected by the arts of the orator, and, no doubt, our professional training renders it easier for us to pierce through the externals of a speech and to reach the real question for decision. But it is none the less an effort to keep alive one's attention to the mumbling and monotonous efforts of a bad speaker." We are not often favored with a revelation of the judicial mind such as this, and Lord Stormonth-Darling's observations will be appreciated for their practical value.- Law Times. During a trial for murder at the Gloucester autumn assizes, Mr. Justice Lawrence seems to have adopted in its entirety the rule of Lord Hale as to corpus delicti— that a man ought never to be convicted of murder or manslaughter on circumstantial evidence alone unless the body has been found (2 Hale, P. C. 290). This rule can, however, be treated only as a caution, like that against accepting the uncorroborated evidence of an accomplice, and does not amount to a rule of law. This appears to be established by the cases cited in "Archbold" (22d edit.), p. 748, and Regina v. Dudley (L. R., 14 Q. B. Div. 276), the case of cannibalism by the survivors of the Mignonette. Perhaps the true account of the doctrine or caution is that given by Sir Henry De Villiers in Upington v. Solomon ([1897]. 9 Buchanan, Cape Supr. Ct. Reports, 240, 276): "I have never understood the law as to the corpus delicti to go so far as to hold that where witnesses swear that they saw the person shot by means of a gun, and where they saw the deceased actually dying, a jury may be called upon to say there is no proof of death whatever. I have always understood this law as to corpus delicti to distinct advance in our constitutional development when we remember that in 1741 a number of peers drew up a protest against the government of Walpole, on the ground that "a sole or even a first minister is an officer unknown to the law of Great Britain and inconsistent with the Constitution" (Rogers' Protests of Lords, vol. 2, p. 10), and that the daughter of Lord North, in a singularly interesting letter written by her to Lord Brougham, says: "In 1769 Lord North became chancellor of the exchequer, and some years after first lord of the treasury. He never would allow us to call him prime minister, saying there was no such thing in the British Constitution (Brougham's Statesmen of the Time of George the Third, vol. 1, p. 392).— Law Times. The time-honored formalities which attend the constitution of a new parliament draw attention to certain differences between the position of the speaker of the house of commons and the presidents or speakers of the commons house in colonial and foreign legislatures. Our speaker's title appears to have been acquired by him as spokesman of the faithful commons when they were in the position rather of a representative deputation of the freeholders and burgesses of the nation than an integral element in a national legislature. The process of his election and approval point in the same direction, and indicate a time when the crown could pick and choose as to whom it would hear in support of the petitions of the commons. The formal claims, too, which he makes to the privileges of freedom of debate and the like clearly mark the effect on our constitutional history of the abortive interference of Charles I with the constitutional rights and freedom of the lower house. The speakers of the two houses of the United States congress, although their office is historically derivable from that of our own speaker, have larger functions as leaders of their respective houses, probably because the federal Constitution of the United States does not admit the president's ministers as members or leaders of either house. In the colonies the privileges of the legislature are secured by statute and not by unwritten constitutional usage, and on the continent the different assemblies have their presidents, who are in the main, consequently an offense within the meaning of secif not solely, chairmen of the meetings, and not, spokesmen of the assembly in dealing with the monarch or the executive.- Law Journal (London). Students of the development of our Constitution will note, with interest, two signs of the times. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, in his speech at Dundee on Thursday in last week, said: "The government have thought fit to revive an ancient and time-honored office which we have all found useful in this country in past years—I mean the office of prime minister." Again, for the first time, probably, in our history, the prime minister, as such, was last week named in the official Court Circular, which is understood to be submitted to the queen before its issue to the press. These are clear indications of the tendency to acknowledge officially the status of the premier, whose rights and duties as "head of the administration are nowhere recorded," and whose position, Mr. Gladstone tells us, "is curiously characteristic of the political genius of the people" (Gladstone's Gleanings, p. 240). The designation of a statesman in the Court Circular by the title of prime minister, whose status is almost, if not, altogether unknown to the statute law, and the reference to the premiership by an eminent statesman as "an office," mark a In connection with General Buller's recent account of the use of barbed wire by the Boers at the battle of Colenso, it is worth while noting the somewhat flowery description in an Irish text-book on the Land Laws of the dangers of this material: "It would appear," says the learned author, “that any possible advantages this device may possess are more than counterbalanced by its formidable and almost inevitable mischief. Woe betide the lonely wayfarer who comes across it on a dark night! Woe worth the chase when hunters, horses and hounds are confronted by the barbed wire fence! Such a 'misfortune may cause the life of many a gallant grey." It was thought by the court, in Collen v. Ellis (32 L. Rep. Ir. 491) that a barbed wire fence bordering a highway was an obstruction to the free passage of persons on the highway, and tion 13 (3) of 14 & 15 Vict. c. 92; and in Stewart v. Wright (9 Times L. Rep. 480) a barbed wire fence adjoining a public footpath was stated to be a nuisance, and the occupier of the lands who had put it up was held to be liable in damages to a person whose mackintosh had been torn while he was walking along the footpath. The Barbed Wire Fence Act of 1893, of course, now enables any local authority to compel the owner of a barbed wire fence which adjoins and is a nuisance" to any public highway to remove it (" nuisance to a highway," as applied to barbed wire, meaning "barbed wire which may probably be injurious to persons or animals lawfully using such highway"). With reference to barbed wire used as fences between adjoining lands, it may be added that in McQuillan v. Cromwellan Iron Ore Company (26 Ir. L. T. Rep. 15) the defendant company, which had fenced off a railway in its control with a fence of this description, was held by the recorder of Belfast to be liable in damages to the occupiers of the adjoining lands whose sheep had come into contact with the fence and had been killed; and it has been suggested that barbed wire might come within the description in 24 & 25 Vict. c. 100, s. 31, of "spring gun, man-trap, or other engine calculated to destroy human life or inflict grievous bodily harm."- Law Times. |