practical destruction of the fabric which has been raised with so much trouble and expense.

To the bar of the State these considerations are not new, and they require no argument to enforce them; and if the members of the bar take that interest in the approaching election so far as the judicial tickets in the several circuits are concerned, which their duty to themselves and the public demands, the result will give us a body of men creditable to the bar and who will accomplish all that was hoped and expected in the creation of the Circuit Court. Will they do it?

PRESIDENT PARKER ON OHIO LEGISLATION.

President COURTLANDT PARKER in his address at the recent meeting of the American Bar Association thus reviews some of the acts adopted at the last session of our General Assembly:

"Ohio has a session volume of 450 pages, but it contains very little not local in its character. It strikes one as strange to find among these an act to amend an act to provide a license on trades, business and professions carried on in cities of the first grade, etc., which reads thus: "Astrologers, fortunetellers, clairvoyants, palmisters, and seers, shall pay a license of $300 per annum." The same act strikes from the original. the word "mediums." This class of "business" in some states comes under obtaining money by false pretenses, and I believe is made in some by special statute itself a crime. It lives, too, upon ignorance and silliness. Licensing it has not even the arguments in its favor which are used by those who advocate the licensing of prostitution, for that is defended by the suggestion that the vice it lives by is universal and irrepressible, and that regard for the health of the community requires that the followers of the "business" be under official care.

"Ohio, like other states, is vexed with the question of contract labor in penitentiaries. With New Jersey she has gone beyond New York, and has enacted that the contract system of employing convicts shall not exist in any form in the penitentiary, but the prisoners shall be employed by the state, and in such way as in the least possible to interfere with or affect free labor, and the managers shall use every effort to so dis

pose of all merchandise as to avoid injurious competition with any business of citizens of the state.'

"This is a difficult, and, considering the interests involved, a delicate subject. But if convicts are to be kept confined, and get work, they must be employed in manufacture. The products of their toil must be sold, and hence competition with outside labor would seem unavoidable. The state has the alternative either herself to carry on trade, or to hire the services of these victims of her laws. There are grand objections to either course, both for the good of the convicts and of the people at large.

"I observe another section in the same act certainly noteworthy.' The earnings of prisoners, not to exceed twenty per cent., are to be placed to their credit respectively. And the funds thus accruing shall be paid to the prisoner or to his family, at such time and in such manner as the managers shall deem best, provided that at least a quarter thereof shall be kept for and paid to himself at the time of his release, it being provided beside, that misconduct may cancel all or part of the credit.

"It shall be the duty of said board of managers,' says this benevolent act to maintain such control over all prisoners as shall prevent them from committing crime, but secure their self-support and accomplish their reformation.""

cess.

All praise to the philanthropy which has originated such an act, and to the state which has adopted it. With some doubt and fears, we hail the experiment, and wish it all sucWe believe that the worst natures respond to kindness, and that there are many more redeemable by proper treatment than are generally supposed. But reformed convicts are few and far between to be numbered, indeed, among the heroes of mankind.

"The supposed necessities of the colored race have doubtless induced a statute which enacts that all persons within the jurisprudence of the state shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities and privileges of inns, restaurants, eating houses, barber shops, public conveyances on land and water, theatres, and all other places of public accommodation and amusement.' The public feeling which has produced this law has shown itself else

where. In New Jersey a special message from the governor called the attention of the legislature to the fact that in the Dutch settled county of Bergen, the managers of a cemetery had refused to let a colored man be buried there, whereupon both political parties rivalled each other in their alacrity for the passage of a law requiring that this place of public accommodation,' to use the Ohio phrase, should not be the exclusive property of the other race. In Massachusetts a special law compels life insurance companies to insure the lives of colored people on the same terms with those of other people, apparently forgetting that tables of longevity might make the risk in one case different from that in the other.

"It may be doubted whether the privileges of this no longer unfortunate race will not be more increased and enhanced by converting public opinion to their side, than by force of statutory enactments. The day is near, I hope and believe, when the prejudices under which they have for centuries labored will all be dissipated here, as they have been in other lands; when all will feel and act in accordance with the great truth adopted and preached by the Apostle-to the Gentiles, that God has made of one blood all nations that are upon the earth, but the advant of that day will be hastened not by statutes, but by the self-improvement of the race itself, now so evidently going on; by manifest desert on the one side, and Christian charity on the other.

"An act appointing a State inspector of the sanitary condition of shops and factories, is another illustration of the advanced philanthropy which seems to characterize Ohio, whose appropriation bill for the year includes about $740,000 for public charities.

"A very valuable act provides for the renewal of records destroyed by fire.

"There is an act additional to that I noticed on the subject of prison discipline, which I cannot but think very noteworthy. It allows sentences to be simply to the penitentiary, leaving the managers to determine its duration within the providem maximum term, evidently having regard to the prisoner's behavior, Of this a daily record is kept. The convict who passes the entire period of his imprisonment without violation of the rules is entitled to immediate restoration

to citizenship. He, who not being able to show such a record, shall at the end of a year present a certificate of good conduct, signed by ten or more reputable citizens of his place of residence, is then entitled to such restoration. And the period of imprisonment diminishes to the well behaved, five days for the first year, seven the second, nine the third, ten thereafter. All this is not new. But some of it is. And all is merciful and philanthropic to a degree.

"It is perhaps true, however, that under such a system, many a poor but honest wretch, victim of disease or want, might almost pray and seek the comfort, health and merciful consideration of a penitentiary life. It is possible, we suppose, to be too humanitarian. Imprisonment is partly retribution, partly the protection of society through the prevention of crime. A penitentiary should not be other than a terror to evil-doers. It may be so managed as that it shall lose this element and be little more than an enforced boarding house. And yet the very word implies the infliction of suffering, if it does not, that this infliction shall be severe enough to produce penitence.

"I shall only notice further an act amending former laws as to the rights of married women, proceeding still further in the direction adopted by statutes elsewhere. By it a husband is neither to be liable for his wife's contract, before marriage, nor for her tort afterwards; nor upon any contract by her, except to the extent of any separate property of hers which he has acquired by ante-nuptial contract, or otherwise, and the wife whom her hushand deserts, or when he, from intemperance or other cause, neglects to provide for his family, may make contracts in her own name for the labor of her minor children and sue for and collect their earnings. She may file a petition in the County court alleging this desertion or neglect, and upon proof thereof, the court must enter judgment, vesting her with the rights, privileges and liabilities of a head of the family, as to the care, custody and con. trol of her minor children, and with all the powers of a feme sole, as to disposing of her real property, free from the custody of her husband. Verily, Ohio has established herself as the earthly paradise of deserted or neglected married women !"

NOTES OF CASES.

LIABILITY FOR SPREADING CONTAGIOUS DISEASE.

The defendant, in the case of Smith v. Baker, United States Circuit Court, Southern District of New York, decided July 5, 1884, 17 Chicago L. News, 7, took his children when they had the whooping cough, a contagious disease, to the boarding house of the plaintiff, to board, and by reason of his negligence, her child and the children of other boarders contracted the disease, whereby she was put to expense, care and labor in consequence of her child's sickness, and sustained pecuniary loss by reason of boarders being kept away. In an action for damages it was held that the defendant was liable. The court, per Wheeler J., say:

"The carrying of persons infected with contagious diseases along public thoroughfares, so as to endanger the health of other travelers, is indictable as a nuisance: Add. Torts § 297; Rex v. Vantandillo, 4 Maule & S. 73. Spreading contagious diseases among animals by negligently disposing of, or allowing to escape, animals infected is actionable: Add. Torts, (Wood's Ed.) 10, note; Anderson v. Buckton, 1 Strange, 192. A person sustaining an injury not common to others by a nuisance is entitled to an action. Co. Litt. 56 a. Negligently imparting such a disease to a person is clearly as great an injury as to impute the having it; and negligently affecting the health of persons injuriously as great a wrong as so affecting that of animals."

REPORTED CASES.

ADMISSIBILITY OF DECLARATIONS AS PART OF RES GESTE. (New York Court of Appeals. March 11, 1884. 95 N. Y..274.) WALDELE . THE NEW YORK CENTRAL AND HUDSON RIVER RAILROAD COMPANY.

Declarations which are merely narrative of a past transaction are not admissible as part of the res gesta.

In an action to recover damages for alleged negligence, causing the death of J., plaintiff's intestate, it appeared that about midnight a freight train passed a street crossing on defendant's road, followed, about