be subject to the approval of the publishers," and the plaintiffs maintained that in law the approval must not be unreasonably withheld, supporting their view by the citation of some old cases incorporating "reasonableness" into the consideration of the powers of arbitrators and certain local authorities. We doubt whether the principles laid down in these decisions could properly have been extended to a case of express contract, and the Lord Chief Justice, who tried the case, intimated at an early stage that he had his own view on the point of law, though he would leave to the jury the question whether the refusal to publish was reasonable. To read into such a contract which gave an unqualified right of exclusion, a proviso that the exclusion must be one of which a jury would approve, would be a wide stretch of the powers which some Judges have assumed in dealing with the rights of parties in other contractual relations, e.g., those of lessor and lessee. The cases, like Young v. Ashley Gardens Co. (1903), which have given to one party to a contract rights of redress against another who acts unreasonably in the assertion, or exercise of his powers, are all based on the inclusion of "reasonableness as one of the express terms of the contract, and it would be a dangerous thing to hand over to juries generally the right to imply such a condition in every case.

CONTRACTS TO INDEMNIFY BAIL-Rex v. Porter, [1910] 1 K. B. 369, was a case in the Court of Criminal Appeal, appealed from a conviction on an indictment for conspiracy. One Clark had been committed by Justices for trial at a quarter sessions on a charge of felony. The alleged conspiracy, of which Porter was convicted, consisted of an agreement between himself and Clark and one Brindley that if Porter and Brindley, pending the charge against Clark would go bail for the latter in £50, then Clark would give them. £50 each as security, so that they would lose nothing if he absconded. The facts were specially so found by the, jury, together with a finding "that the appellant (Porter), in becoming a party to that agreement, did not do so with the intention that Clark should abscond;" and, moreover, the count in the indictment on which the appellant was convicted contained no averment of intent, but a bare statement of the agreement as above related. Jelf, J., in the Court below, held that Porter was guilty of a criminal conspiracy,

and this was affirmed by the Court of Criminal Appeal. Lord Alverstone, C.J., writing the opinion, after citing several fases, said:—

“It is, in our opinion, difficult to conceive any act more likely to tend to produce a public mischief than that which was done in this case. It is to the interest of the public that criminals should be brought to justice, and, therefore, that it should be made as difficult as possible for a criminal to abscond; and for many years it has been held that not only are bail responsible on their recognizance for the due appearance of the person charged, but that, if it comes to their knowledge that he is about to abscond, they should at once inform the police of the fact. It has been suggested to us that the more modern view of bail is that it is a mere contract of suretyship, and that an agreement to indemnify bail, therefore, does not involve any illegality. If that were so, as soon as the bail had got his indemnity, he would have no interest whatever in seeing that the accused person was forthcoming to take his trial, and it is obvious that criminals, particularly if possessed of means, would very frequently abscond from justice. We have been asked to follow the opinion expressed by Martin, B., in Reg. v. Broome, 18 L. T (O. S.) 19, that there is no objection to the indemnification of bail, which opinion was acted on by the recorder of London in Rex v. Stockwell, 66 J. P. 376. It is sufficient to say that we do not agree with the opinion of Martin, B. In these circumstances we are of opinion that Jelf, J., rightly held that the agreement entered into by the appellant was an illegal contract, not only in the sense of being unenforceable, but also as being one which clearly tended to produce a public mischief, and that it amounted to a criminal conspiracy, without any necessity for a finding by the jury that there was an intent to pervert or obstruct the course of Justice."

UNCOMMUNICATED SECRET TRUSTS.-A very clear illustration of an elementary rule in the law of trust-devises is afforded by the case of Vonier v. Harris, heard before Mr. Justice Joyce on June 13th. The plaintiff claimed that, under the will of the late Father Ignatius, the monastery of Llanthony, in Wales, was held by the defendants in trust for him. Father Ignatius had devised the monastery to the defendants in fee simple as joint tenants, and on the same

day as he made his will he executed another document addressed to the defendants, in which he expressed the wish that in certain events the devised property should be conveyed to the plaintiff. The whole, and only, question to be decided in the action was whether this document had been communicated by Father Ignatius to the defendants in his lifetime. Mr. Justice Joyce found that the plaintiff had not proved any such communication, and dismissed the action, holding that the defendants were under no legal obligation to divest themselves of the devised property. It was not thought worth while, apparently, to cite any authority for the proposition of law involved in this decision, and there was no difficulty in coming to the necessary conclusion of fact. Difficulties have, however, arisen in cases of this description, and in particular where the devisees are joint tenants. It may be useful to refer to two of the most recent cases, in one of which the general rule was formulated in the House of Lords. French v. French is to be found only in the Irish reports (1902) 1 Ir. R. 172. But the case went to the House of Lords, and on pp. 225 and 230 of the report the rule in question was stated by Lord Halsbury and Lord Davey. Lord Davey's statement is this: "It is now well established, and has been settled since the time of Lord Hardwicke, that if a testator communicates in his lifetime to a proposed devisee or legatee that he has left him his property, and expresses a wish that the property should be disposed of in a particular manner, and the legatee or devisee by acquiescence, or even by silence, accepts that communication, and the testator dies without any repudiation, a trust is fastened upon his conscience, as it is said, and he cannot afterwards appropriate the property to his own use. or dispose of it otherwise than in accordance with the wishes which were then communicated to him and which he has accepted." The other case to be mentioned is In re Stead (1900). There Lord Justice (then Mr. Justice) Farwell referred to most of the authorities, and to the difference it made (in the case of joint tenants) whether the communication to one of them took place before or after the making of the will.

DUPLICITY OF PLEAS.-In Rex v. Banks (July 31st, 1911), a full Court of Criminal Appeal was empanelled in order to deal with a very curious situation which the ingen

uity of counsel for the prisoner had created. The prisoner was charged at the Old Bailey, on a coroner's inquisition, with the murder of a child; he was also charged at the same time upon the indictment of the grand jury with the manslaughter of the same child. To both charges he pleaded not guilty." Following the usual course where inquisition and indictment clash, the prosecution offered no evidence on the inquisition. and the prisoner was formally acquitted by the jury. Then the Judge asked counsel to defend him on the charge of manslaughter, and the counsel chosen at once asked leave to add a p'ea of autrefois acquit to the plea of not guilty. This the Judge, without discussing the matter, allowed. The prisoner was convicted, and in due course appealed. It is certainly very difficult to avoid the conclusion that autrefois acquit is a successful answer to the indictment; for the prisoner had been in peril on the same facts in the same case under the inquisition charging him with murder. The Court, unable to avoid this conclusion, met an unmeritorious technicality by another equally unreal. They held that the two pleas, "not guilty" and "autrefois acquit,” are alternative, not cumulative, so that the second plea was bad for duplicity. Another difficulty stood in their way, namely, that according to the decision in Rex v. Drury (3 C. & K. 190), the Judge has a discretion to allow both pleas; and this the presiding Judge had undoubtedly done. But the Court was determined not to strain at a gnat, and so it held, with all solemnity, that the presiding Judge, since there had been no discussion of the question before him. had not exercised his discretion at all in allowing the plea. They, therefore, exercised theirs for him-and disallowed it.

REFORMATION OF INSURANCE POLICY.-In Niagara Fire Insurance Co. v. Jordan (68 S. E. 611), the plaintiff made an oral contract with an insurance company to insure his property. The policy was subsequently delivered to him, but he put it away without reading it, and did not discover until three months later when the property was burned, that by a mistake of the agent a name other than that of the insured had been inserted as the beneficiary. The Supreme Court of Georgia held that equity would reform the policy so as to make it read as it was intended to read. It said that a failure to inspect the policy, which was in plaintiff's possession for nearly three months, was not such laches and

negligence on his part as to preclude any right of reformation of the policy. The trend of authority is that a mere failure of the insured to read his policy does not amount to such laches as will debar him from having such policy reformed for mistake therein. A policy of insurance is issued by the insurer and signed by him or his agent. It is not contemplated that the insured shall sign it. In the insurer's promise to deliver an accurate policy, according to his oral agreement with the insured, the insured had a just expectation that there will be no designed variance. A man should not be permitted for his pecuniary advantage to impute it to another as gross negligence that the other trusted to his fidelity to his promise. The case is quite different from those instances where a man, who has negligently signed a contract, endeavours to be relieved of its obligation by setting up his own negligence. "There is no rule of law which fixes the period within which a man may discover that a writing does not express the contract which he supposed it to contain, and which bars him of relief for delay in asserting his rights, short of the period fixed by the statute of limitations."

This decision is in line with an Illinois case, (Home Insurance Company v. Myer 93 Ill. 272), where a man applied to an insurance company for a policy on his house, No. 59 Milwaukee avenue, and the agent examined the premises and an oral contract to insure the house was entered into, and the written policy subsequently delivered. The house being afterwards destroyed by fire, it was discovered that the policy as issued described it as No. 57 Milwaukee avenue. In a suit at law on the policy A. could not have recovered for he could not prove that 57 Milwaukee avenue had been destroyed, nor could he prove by oral evidence that the parties had intended to insure No. 59 and not No. 57-because this was contrary to the rule that a written agreement cannot be varied or contradicted by parol. But the Supreme Court held that a Court of Equity would correct or reform the policy so as to express the real intention.

EXECUTORS AND TRUSTEES.-To appoint any private person a sole trustee is always regarded as an extremely dangerous thing for the trust estate. The Court itself acts on this

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