it may not be, according to the circumstances; and so must be generally a question for the jury. If getting off or on a moving street-car might save life or win a fortune, no one could say but that failing to attempt it would be an insane want of ordinary care in an ordinary person. It must be always a question of circumstances; and generally a question for the jury." Appeal "as to costs only." In Buckley v. Vair," the Appellate Division following certain English decisions holds that an appellant cannot, by joining with an appeal as to costs, an appeal as to other parts of the judgment in which he fails, escape from the effect of s. 24 of the Judicature Act, R. S. O. 1914, c. 56, by which an order "as to costs only which by law are left to the discretion of the Court," cannot be appealed against except by leave of the Court or judge making the order. Respondeat superior Fall of gangway left in slanting position-Negligence. In R. J. Q. 53 S. C. for February, the only decision which invites special notice seems to be Cantillon v. Canadian Pacific R. W.S in which the Superior Court in Review hold that the lessee of a building on a wharf occupied as a freight shed, is not responsible for an accident which happens to a labourer working in it, by the fall of a heavy gangway belonging to the lessee, which stood against a post in a slanting position, and was knocked down by a carter who was unloading his cart near by. The fact that the lessee had not taken steps to have the gangway attached to the post so that it could not fall was held by the Court not to constitute an act of negligence on his part. 740 O. L. R. 465. A. H. F. L. CONTEMPORARY LEGAL REVIEWS AND The Law Times (English) for January 12th has an Article on Petitions of Right, which by reason of the increased frequency and importance of contracts between subjects and Government departments arising out of the war, are likely to occur in greater number than in normal times. After citing cases to show that a certain doubt exists as to whether the petitioning subject has any remedy if the responsible Minister advises the Crown to refuse capriciously to put into a due course of investigation any proper question raised on a petition of right, the writer says: 'The conclusions to which these remarks appear to lead is that it is time that the petition of right was made a matter of proceeding as of course. Some new form of procedure is required that would enable any subject to bring his action, at his own risk, of course, as to costs, against the Crown in all cases in which a petition of right now lies. This would remove all question as to the responsibility of the responsible Minister for advice tendered to the Crown. It would remove all cause or fancied cause of grievance where the fiat is withheld. It would remove the necessity for any flat, and, indeed, turn the petition of right, which is now in theory and possibly in practice a matter of grace, into a matter of right. The time is now propitious for such a step. The fiction of the descent of the Sovereign from the throne and submission to being sued before his inferior officers is picturesque, but out of date? Under the heading Reminders on a Soldier's Death the Law Times (English) for January 19th, calls attention in a very timely way to the following points as to soldiers' wills and estates, among others, citing authority: 1. His will may be valid as regards personalty though unattested or even oral; 2. But when he made his will he must have been in actual military service,"-i.e., he must have taken some step towards joining the forces in the field; It is by no means the intention of the C. L. T. to make this monthly feature a mere jumble of extracts. Numerous exchanges from different parts of the Empire and from the United States are examined, and attention is called, month by month, to whatever seems most striking and important in them. 3. He need not have attained twenty-one, provided that he was fourteen years old when he made his will; 4. A guardian of a child cannot be appointed by one of these privileged wills; 5. These privileged wills do not pass realty; 6. If a privileged will is attested, still the gift to a witness is valid; 7. An army nurse is a soldier. Other paragraphs deal with exemptions in England from estate duties in the case of soldiers. The same issue of the Law Times gives the true story of the words of the old Scottish judge Lord Eskgrove, in sentencing a man to death for stabbing a soldier, according to Lord Cockburn who was in Court on the occasion: “And not only did you murder him, whereby he was bereaved of his life, but you did thrust, or push, or pierce, or project, or propel the lethal weapon through the belly-band of his regimental breeches, which were His Majes-ty's !' It adds: 'Innumerable anecdotes, almost equally ludicrous, are retailed of Eskgrove, many of them being enshrined in the locus classicus of all that relates to the heroic days of the Scottish Bench and Bar, Cockburn's Memorials. Of these, that recording his language in house at Luss, assaulted the occupier, Sir James Colquhoun, and sentencing certain prisoners to death for having broken into a robbed him of a large sum of money, is one of the most characteristic, for, after explaining the heinous nature of the crime, and detailing the circumstances in which it was committed, he wound up with this climax: "And this you did; and God, pre serve us! Joost when they were sitten doon to their denner." The Law Times (English) for January 26th, has an Article on Trustees and Litigation which deals with the position of trustees in regard to the costs of litigation in which they are involved. In the Solicitors' Journal for January 19th, we read that efforts have been made since the war to place real estate on the same footing as personal estate in regard to soldiers' wills. Section 11 of the Imp. Wills Act, 1837 (our R. S. O. 1914, c. 120, s. 14), excuses soldiers' and sailors' wills of personal estate from the necessity of compliance with the statutory testamentary requirements, and even validates nuncupative wills of personal estate, i.e., wills made by verbal declaration, but there is no corresponding relaxation as to real estate. But the Wills' (Soldiers and Sailors) Bill introduced by the Lord Chancellor, and now under consideration in the House of Lords, is intended to remove the anomaly. Clause 2 (1) is as follows: 'A testamentary disposition of any real estate in England or Ireland made by a person to whom sec. 11 of the Wills Act, 1837, applies and who dies after the passing of this Act, shall, nɔtwithstanding that the person making the disposition was at the time of making it under twenty-one years of age, be valid in any case where the person making the disposition was of such age, and the disposition has been made in such manner and form that if the disposition had been a disposition of personal estate made by such soldier, mariner, or seaman domiciled in England and Ireland, it would have been valid.' We respectfully call the attention of our own legislature to this enactment, and submit that if such an amendment of the Wills Act is proper in England, it is much more proper here where land is on the same footing as personal property much more than is the case in Great Britain. The Central Law Journal for February 1st, contains a noticeable article by Edward D'Arcy, of St. Louis, entitled Bacon's Prophecy.-The Chaos of Cases. The writer tells us that 'Lord Bacon said that within three hundred years the world would come to judge between himself and Lord Coke. The three hundred years have passed and the world is reaping the fruit of its decision to follow Lord Coke. These two men held opposing views concerning the origin and nature of law-views so radically and fundamentally different that if the one set be true, the other must necessarily be untrue. The school of thought represented by the followers of Lord Coke has, up to the present time, greatly preponderated in point of numbers. In fact it may be said that, since the time of Lord Coke, the legal world, as a whole, has followed in his footsteps, and, likewise as a whole, has repudiated the fundamental concepts of law held by Lord Bacon. Bacon's conception of law was that it consists of ideas which are not created by any human law-maker, but which exist as mental facts, independently of their recognition or non-recognition by humanity. He perceived that as man apprehended or discovered these already existing ideas and incorporated them into his statutes or cases, the resultant system of law would be founded upon justice, so that when the winds and floods came and beat upon the house, it would stand. Coke, upon the other hand, conceived of law as a thing created by statute or decision. He looked upon it as entirely local, as a matter of the fiat of the particular legislature or judge considering the question at issue. These, in the main, were the differences between the two men. From these differences important results arose. Bacon believed that the fundamental ideas of the law could be gathered and stated in the shape of maxims or principles, in small compass, perhaps with illustrative cases explaning the field of operation of each. Coke, on the other hand, believed in the case system. He issued his Reports, and the world has since then followed his lead, producing such a mass of reports, undigested and undigestible, that it has become well-nigh impossible to accommodate them on our shelves. Likewise we have drifted away from Bacon's idea of establishing a few principles and basing decisions on them. Our authors for the most part refuse to cite maxims, our Courts to listen to them, or our schools to teach them. As long as lawyers delude themselves with the idea that new principles of law are discovered every decade or two, just so long will we continue to be swamped by the publishing houses with ephemeral works designed to meet the appetite for quantity instead of quality. . . The fact of the matter is that the fundamental principles of the law consist of a few ideas... Were this grasped, and these ideas stated sententiously, as the Romans stated them, and were our cases decided in accordance with them, the law would grow naturally and beautifully into a harmonious whole, instead of our having, as is the case in the United States to-day, fifty jurisdictions, each warring with all the others, and with itself also.' We have deemed this article worthy of an unusually long extract, but would much like Mr. D'Arcy to express his meaning more clearly. There is no doubt the great accumulation of reported cases is an embarrassment, and a growing one; but the way the matter presents itself to us at present is this: legal questions should, of course, be decided on principle, but broad general principles without the reported decisions showing how those principles have been actually applied in decided cases, would be far more uncertain even than it at present is. |