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mony with the decisions elsewhere. We will refer to a few cases showing the conflict which has been going on and the final conclusion reached. It was held in Frevall v. Fitch, 5 Whar. 325, and in Hopkins v. R. Co., 3 W. & S. 410, that an instrument in the form of a promissory note, if attested by the seal of the corporation, was not negotiable. In Carr v. Lefevre, 3 Casey, 413, it was held that a bond issued by a corporation, payable to bearer, will pass by delivery, and the holder may sue on it in his own name. In the opinion of the court, by Mr Chief Justice Lewis, it is said: "We do not desire to have any doubt on the question whether the holder of bonds issued by a corporation, payable to bearer, may maintain an action on them in his own name. Such bonds are not strictly negotiable under the law merchant, as are promissory notes and bills of exchange. They are however instruments of a peculiar character, and being expressly designed to be passed from hand to hand, and by common usage so transferred, are capable of passing by delivery so as to enable the holder to maintain an action on them in his own name." This rule is recognized to be correct in Phila. & Sunbury R. Co. v. Lewis, 9 Casey 33. It was ruled in Diamond v. Lawrence County, 1 Wright, 353, that a coupon bond of the county, under seal, should not be treated as negotiable paper, although it was there conceded that all the courts, American and English, held otherwise. County of Beaver v. Armstrong, 8 Wright, 63, contains a very full reference to the authorities, showing that corporation bonds under seal payable to bearer in money were negotiable. See also Bunting Admr. v. Camden, etc., R. Co., 31 P. F. Smith, 254; Gibson v. Lenhart, 5 Out. 522; Phelan v. Moss, 17 P. F. Smith, 59; McSparran v. Neeley, 10 Norris, 17. Sup. Ct. Penn., Oct. 6, 1884. Mason v. Frick. Opinion by Mercur, J. (15 W. Note Cas. 369.)

MINISTER PHELPS FIRST AFTER-DINNER SPEECH IN ENGLAND.

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[From the London Daily Standard, June 5.]

AT the Mansion house last night that 10 on muro, and

tertained her majesty's judges at a banquet, and not only the bench but the bar and law generally were largely represented. An additional interest attached to the occasion from the presence of the American minister, who is a distinguished member of the legal profession in the United States, and who made his first appearance in public. There were some 300 ladies and gentlemen present, the legal notabilities being Lord Justice Lindley, Lord Chief Justice Morris, Lord Justice Fry, Lord Watson, Lord Justice Bowen, Justices Denman, Kay, Manistry, Mathew, Cave, Day, Lopes and North, Baron Pollock and a strong muster of Q. C.'s and of other guests.

At the banquet the loving cup was circulated and the royal toasts were duly drunk.

The lord mayor proposed the health of the minister of the United States. While cordially welcoming his excellency in the name of the whole country, he would express a hope that the existing relations between the two countries might be maintained, so that no great diplomatic activity on his part would be necessary.

Mr. Phelps, whose rising was the signal for continued applause, said: I am very much indebted to you, my lord mayor, for the very kind words in which my name has been presented, and to you, my lords, ladies and gentlemen, for the more than kind and generous manner in which you have received it. I do not presume to take to myself in any degree the honor of this reception I am as yet a comparative stranger within the gates of England, and have no such claim upon your personal consideration as had my distinguished

predecessor; but I own it is more gratifying to me than any personal compliment which could be paid to me, for I see in this another proof, in addition to the many which have been pressed upon me during the short time since I landed on these shores, of the cordial and hearty feeling of sympathy which exists between the English people and the people of the country which I have the great honor to represent. An American representative coming here finds that it is no foreign mission on which he has been sent. On both sides of the Atlantic he finds that he is equally at home. He has changed his sky, but not the hearts by which he is surrounded. [Applause.] He comes as a stranger, but he is soon made to perceive that he is welcomed and established at once as a friend. [Hear, hear.] It is an undeniable fact, and in my judgment a most significant aud gratifying fact, that the relations between the people of the two great countries are growing more cordial every day. I believe they never were so cordial as they are at this moment. [Applause.] International prejudices are usually the offspring of international misunderstanding; and these rapidly disappear under the influence of a large and liberal international intercourse. [Hear, hear.] That is the means, under providence, that is bringing these people nearer and nearer, all the time, to each other. [Hear, hear.] Steam and electricity have bridged the Atlantic, and both countries are full of the citizens of each other. Many Americans live here, and many English reside in the United States. Every summer this country is overspread with visitors from the other side of the Atlantic. How cordially on our side of the Atlantic the feeling I have referred to as existing here is reciprocated, those who have traveled in the United States will know [hear, hear], while those who have not been there I cordially invite in the name of my country to go. [Cheers.] It is such intercourse that has brought the two people together in the manner to which I have alluded. The nature of the relatious between governments, and especially of great nations, is most important undoubtedly, and we are to be felicitated, that as the lord mayor has said, the relations between the governments of Englaud and of the United States are now on so satisfactory a footing that nothing has to be said of them on any occasion. But after all the real sympathy and fraternity which should exist between nations depend not upon the governments, and are not to be brought about by diplomacy; they depend upon the personal sympathy of the feelings of the people for each other. [Hear, hear.] If I may be permitted to allude to recent events, I can assure you that when it was perceived in America that the clouds of war which appeared to be settling down began to dissipate, and there was a hope-in which I pray God we may not be disappointed-that the sunshine, if continued, was likely to fall unobstructed on the multiplied industries of England, there was no people within the range of humanity by whom that conclusion was received with more sincere and complete satisfaction and gratitude than by the people of the United States. [Cheers.] Especially, sir, as it seems to me, should the fraternal feeling between these great nations find expression in this place, and on such an occasion, where you, my lord mayor, preside in the capacity of chief magistrate of this greatest city in the world, whose commerce has more than put a girdle round about the earth, and whose great industry and business have made its commerce. It is there that you touch us most nearly. America is emphatically a country of industry and business, and in no other country in the world do business men have so large a share of influence in the affairs of government. Amer ica is pre-eminently a country for the worker and not for the idler, and therefore here more than anywhere

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else is it appropriate that expression should be given to the true relations which exist between the two countries. [Hear, hear.] But there is another reason why an American representative who, as you have said, my lord mayor, is an American lawyer, should be glad to come here on this occasion, and that is the common share we claim with you and the common admiration which we feel with you for those distinguished men who are the judges of England. [Hear, hear.] We claim them also as our brethren, for in hundreds of American courts, and to thousands of lawyers as well as judges who never saw and never will see the faces of English judges, their names are household words, and their judgments are the subjects of constant study and instruction. Of American judges, it may be said that they administer laws over the wide area between the Atlantic and Pacific largely founded on your judgments here, so greatly are they esteemed and valued. We have lately had among us one of the must distinguished members of the English bench-Lord Chief Justice Coleridge. He came as the guest of the American bar, but he remained as the guest of the American people. [Cheers.] He delighted them, and I believe he came away not altogether displeased with us. [Hear, hear.] I hope many of his distinguished brethren will follow his example and travel through what I may call the second jurisdiction of the British bench. I think in no one thing are the British people more largely to be congratulated than upon their judiciary; for it is British justice which has built up British liberty. The freedom of England has been fought for in many a field, and contended for in many a parliament, and many a great light has been thrown upon it from the judicial bench, and the freedom we enjoy we inherited from you. Your poet laureate has condensed the whole thing in his lines:

"Where freedom broadens slowly down From precedent to precedent." [Cheers]. The London Times of June 5th says: Mr. Phelps, the new United States minister, appeared for the first time on Wednesday evening in his official character, before a large assemblage of Englishmen. He gave on that occasion abundant reason for the British public to desire that he may let it see much of him, and enable it to become intimately acquainted with his merits. In his answer to the Lord Mayor's proposal of his health, he chose his topics with the utmost judgment, and treated them with perfect taste. It was something of an ordeal at once for his audience and for himself, and both emerged from it with mutual satisfaction. The succession to Mr. Lowell could not but be a trying inheritance. An infusion of a little literary crossgrainedness into his predecessor's diplomatic behaviour would have smoothed Mr. Phelps' entrance on his ministerial career. Mr. Lowell has supplied him with no opportunities of solacing contrast between men of genius and men of affairs. No legation could have been conducted more efficiently than that of the United States during the past few years. Its chief showed himself to be as capable in interviews at the foreign office as he was brilliant in the Abbey Chapter House. His successor is known for excellent business qualities. He spoke on Wednesday with a grace of diction and an elevation of tone which prove him fitted to fill Mr. Lowell's place as well socially as in office. The two countries want at the United States legation in London one who will live with Englishmen while be negotiates. The lord mayor expressed a natural hope that very little might be heard of Mr. Phelps' discharge of his diplomatic duties. As Mr. Phelps said in his reply, it is indeed matter for congratulation when, as now, they require nothing to be said about them. Because they excite no public anxiety it is not to be supposed they either are super

fluous or are not being performed. Between leading States like the Union and Great Britain causes of friction are ever liable to arise. They may be rubbed into sores, or soothed into subsidence, much at the discretion of diplomacy. A sympathetic American representative will understand that for Englishmen to wish to provoke American ill-will is inconceivable. He will comprehend their general disposition to friendliness, and something warmer. He will put to the true account the accidents of local manner and expression. He will feel himself accredited to the British people no less than to the secretary for foreign affairs. To Englishmen it is at least as important as to an American minister that he should accept his functious in that spirit. Mr. Phelps' sample of himself at the Mansion House is testimony that his interpretation of his obligations agrees with theirs.

A special connection with one of the great divisions of English life and thought tends to facilitate a general appreciation of the nationality it is an American envoy's province to study. A member of an American profession which is also an English profession begins by not being a stranger. Mr. Lowell from the moment he occupied the legation was at home. As a member of the vocation of letters, he had a key to the citadel of English hearts. Mr. Phelps is among the most eminent of American lawyers, and has stepped on shore in the midst of a confraternity which is scarcely other than his own. An American minister who has spent, as Mr. Phelps worthily boasts, his best years in the practice of the law, is provided with a wedge warranted to open the hardest knots of insular reserve. He speaks the dialect in vogue wherever lawyers are met; and where are they not? Armed with the professional shibboleths, he has of his personal right as unchallenged admittance into the inmost recesses of English habits as the author whose heart both sides of the Atlautic are equally empowered to read. Not in literature itself, common as it is to the two lands, is the National inheritance of Great Britain and the United States more genuinely undivided and joint than in law. There are American text books which have educated two generations of English jurists. Judgments of English courts are cited at Washington with hardly less technical and almost more moral authority than the decisions of American judges. On particular points, sometimes grave, oftener trivial, the courts of the two countries differ. In guiding principles and in spirit they obey the same motives, and would esteem it a serious discredit to be convicted of unexplained divergence. For both the advantage is manifest and extraordinary. The absence of direct authority in the expositions from across the water, to which Mr. Phelps referred, increases rather than lessens their utility. A lawyer adopts more or less mechanically when in his favor, or struggles against as tyrannical when adverse, precedents from his native tribunals. Without any sense of constraint he consults conclusions arrived at by minds which, though foreign, are trained like his own and acknowledge identical principles, in order to inform his own intelligence, and to assist his reason in its voluntary operations. American lawyers are in this impersonal way very familiar already to Englishmen, and have long been highly regarded by them. Individually they are less well known abroad than the liberality of the English legal vacation has enabled the professors of this country to be. Mr.Phelps will do much toward repairing the omission. He will be a medium toward bringing the English and American bars and benches together in other modes than by their partnership in law books and axioms. Lord Coleridge investigated minutely during his American tour the American legal procedure, and is believed to have persuaded himself of its adaptibility in several respects to English needs. Mr. Phelps can

similarly compare the system in which he is an expert with that from which it has been mainly derived. He is heartily welcome to any transportable improvements he may discover. The one return to be asked of him is that he shall not praise English law for its defects. He quoted at the Mansion House an American judge's description of the two courses open to disappointed American suitors. They may either appeal the case or go away and swear at the court. With reasonable professional feeling he seems to regret that his countrymen are unlike Englishmen in inclining to the second alternative. He is as an American, though not as a lawyer, ungrateful at any rate in seeming to reprobate the American disregard of the liberty of appeal. It is devoutly to be wished that English litigants were slower to use it. Redundancy of appeals is the disgrace of English law. It would frequently be better to go away and swear at the court in moderation. Courts however have broader shoulders here perhaps that in parts of the United States.

Of the incorruptibility and impartiality of British courts there can be no question. The praise is so indisputable that the judges can themselves join in it without consciousness of an indulgence in vainglory. Care simply for the true decision is an obvious quality of British judges. Sir Hardinge Giffard uttered on Wednesday a hope that no political and constitutional changes may be allowed to sully judicial patronage at its source, without any real fear that the Nation would in any circumstances suffer the intolerable pollution. The extent to which recent legal reforms have restored to the Nation possession of its own law, and made law a manageable and available instrument of National life, is more debatable ground. Lord Justice Lindley does not claim without cause that English jurisprudence in the last few years has shaken off a vast load of technicalities. It has become more practical and heedful of common sense. It employs the learning of the past as a clue to the truth, and does not feel it a deep groove from which it may not try to escape. The sole doubt is whether the evident amelioration there has been of legal processes, and the advance toward a certainty of the triumph of right in the end, have been sufficiently matched by an improved prospect of final and speedy deliverance from the legal labyrinth. English law, though much less unintelligible and artificial than formerly, remains for the litigant, as it has been said to be for the practitioner, a jealous mistress, that bears no rival. No wise man will go to law now any more than of old who is not prepared to make it for an indefinite time his profession. A suit progresses more swiftly than in the days of Lord Eldon; it is scarcely easier for a suitor to be sure when, if ever, he will be out of it for good and all. In view of all the unavoidable complications of modern existence it is unfair that a necessary like litigation should be a resource against which prudence warns in the United States according to the minister, suitors either appeal or swear at the court. They are not hung up on both horns of the dilemma at the same instant. In England it is not to be assumed that they abstain always from the second form of intemperance because they are ex-. travagantly addicted to the first.

NEW BOOKS AND NEW EDITIONS. SHARSWOOD & BUDD'S LEADING CASES ON REAL PROPERTY.

The second volume of this series is at hand. We can do no more than reiterate our opinion expressed on the publication of the first volume. The editorship has been deprived, by death, of the services of the accomplished Judge Sharswood, but Mr. Budd shows good discrimination in selection, and his notes are well

conceived and arranged. The work is published by M. Murphy, of Philadelphia.

CORRESPONDENCE.

SURETYSHIP.

Editor of the Albany Law Journal:

The death of one of two joint sureties discharges his estate both in law and in equity. Wood v. Fisk, 63 N. Y. 245. But to effect that result the undertaking must be joint, and not joint and several. Id. The relation also must be strictly that of a surety. Richardson v. Draper, 87 N. Y. 337. And the rule obtains in case of direct proceedings by a creditor against the legal representatives of the deceased surety, but not where the action is brought by a co-surety for contribution. Johnson v. Harvey, 84 N. Y. 363.

The doctrine of the last cited case would seem to encourage circuity of actions, or make it necessary, rather than to discourage the same, which generally is the policy of the law.

In Richardson v. Draper, supra, Earl, J., delivering the opinion, makes in passing the following observation: "The reasoning upon which the exemption of the deceased surety's estate from liability is founded, though sanctioned by numerous cases, is not very convincing, and has not always been viewed by judges and jurists with favor. It is difficult to perceive why the estate of a surety who was a joint obligor, upon whose credit and responsibility mainly the obligee loaned his money, should be discharged by the death of the surety. It would seem that in good conscience and sound morals, and upon principles of natural justice, it should respond and bear the loss, if any, rather than the obligee who trusted the surety."

The views of Judge Elliott with respect to the importance of following precedents, as cited in the ALBANY LAW JOURNAL of June 13, 1885, are sensible and judicious. To determine when to depart from precedent is most difficult. But such power should exist. J. B. DALEY.

June 19, 1885.

THE

COURT OF APPEALS DECISIONS.

HE following decisions were handed down Tues day, June 23, 1885:

Judgment affirmed with, costs-Crosby v. Hotaling; Adamson v. Elwell; Almy v. Thurber; Risley v. Abbey; Langley v. Sixth Avenue Railroad Co.; Pond v. Starkweather. Order affirmed, with costsWoerrishoffer v. North River Construction Co.Order of General Term reversed; that of Special Term affirmed, with costs-Rice v. Barrett.- Judgment affirmed-People v. Morse alias West.- -Motion for reargument denied, with costs-Jackson v. Andrews.

-Motion to amend remittitur denied, with costsCarpenter v. New York, Lake Erie & Western R. Co.

-Motion to amend remittitur. Grauted, with costs to be paid by appellant and without costs of this motion-In re Petition of Waring and another.Motion to amend remittitur. Granted and remittitur to be amended so as to allow appellants costs of appeal, together with all necessary disbursements in both-In the matter of the final accounting of the executors of William Tilden. -Motion to put cause on calendar for day certain. Denied without costs-City of Brooklyn v. Copeland; Parker v. Supervisors of Saratoga; Haight v. Same; Powell v. Same.- -Motion to strike cause from calendar. Granted on payment of taxable costs of appeal and $100 counsel fee-Champlin v. Stodart.

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