The Court held, in the first place, that the statements, if true, formed a good defence to the action, that it was competent for the Department to delegate the conduct of their business to the Vice-President, and that the decision of the Vice-President was the decision of the Department. Lord Dundas observed that the statute which constituted the Department (the Education (Scotland) Act 1872) left the Department a free hand as to the methods by which they might conduct their business, and that these methods were not subject to challenge and investigation in the Courts, provided they were not contrary to their statutory powers or to the elementary principles of justice and fair dealing.

The Court further held that the defenders being a Government department, their statements must be accepted as true unless they were specifically denied by the pursuers, and in the absence of a specific denial, they found themselves able to throw out the action on the record without sending it to trial.

The decision on the above point is in line with the decision of the High Court of Justiciary in Stevenson v. Roger ([1914], 2 S. T. 406). In that case the manager of a mine was charged with contraventions of the Coal Mines Act 1911. The statute provided that no prosecution should be instituted without the consent of the Home Secretary in writing. The complaint was at the instance of the Procurator Fiscal (who represents the Lord Advocate as public prosecutor), and bore that it was brought with the consent of the Home Secretary. The accused pleaded that a document produced was not sufficient evidence of the consent required by the statute. But the Court held that evidence was unnecessary, and that it was sufficient if the Lord Advocate or one of his representatives (whether in the Supreme or in the inferior Courts) stated to the Court that the Lord Advocate had the consent of the Secretary of State to the prosecution.

An unusual case is 'Wallace v. Bergius ([1914], 2 S. L. T. 440), where a motor car which at the time of a collision was on the wrong side of the road was held to be blameless, and the car which was on the right side was held to be alone in fault. When the cars were approaching each other, both of them were travelling on the north side of the road-the speed in each case being about twenty miles an hour. The north side was the right side for the defender's car and the wrong side for the pursuer's car. When the cars were about thirty yards apart, the defender's car swerved to the south (its wrong) side of the road, and, about the same time, the pursuer's car swerved to the south (its proper) side, and it was on the south side of the road that the collision took place. The Court held that the driver of the defender's car had reasonable grounds for believing that the driver of the pursuer's car intended to continue on his wrong side of the road, and could not be blamed for attempting at the last moment to avoid a collision by swerving to the other side. In substance, the Court applied to the case the principle (which has long been familiar in cases of collision at sea) that where a party who is primarily at fault has, by his own wrong doing, put the other party in a position of danger and forced him to act in an emergency, he is not entitled to plead fault against the other party merely because he has not taken the best possible course in the emergency. Lord Dundas observed that, while decisions in nautical cases must not be rashly applied to incidents of the road, there was no reason why the fundamental considerations of good sense and fairness which underlie the one class of case may not also apply to the other.

In M'Taggart v. William Barr & Sons, Limited ([1914], 2 S. L. T. 430), the appellant, a workman, obtained a medical certificate that he was disabled from work, owing to

miner's nystagmus, on 26th March 1914. He had worked with the respondents from 15th May to 11th July 1913. On that date he was injured, and thereafter he did no work until the date of disablement. In these circumstances, the arbitrator, under the Workmen's Compensation Act, held that the onus was on the workman to prove that the disease was due to the nature of his employment with the respondents within the year preceding the date of disablement, and, on the evidence, that that onus had not been discharged. The question of onus turned on sect. 8 (2) of the Act, which (when taken along with the Third Schedule to the Act and the orders of the Secretary of State) enacts that where the workman “at or immediately before" the date of disablement by miner's nystagmus was employed in the process of mining, the disease shall be deemed to be due to the nature of the employment unless the employer proves the contrary. As the workman had ceased working eight months before the date of the disablement, it was not easy to maintain that he was employed "at or immediately before" the disablement. It was, however, strenuously argued that the words "immediately before" referred not to sequence of time, but to sequence of employments, and included the last employment of the workman in the process of mining, however distant it might be, provided it was within the year. This argument was rejected by the Court, and it was held that the statutory presumption did not apply, and that the workman could not succeed unless he proved affirmatively that his disease was due to the nature of his employment with the respondents. The decision is in accord with the English case of Dean v. Rubian Art Potteries, Limited ([1914], 2 K. B. 213), although in one sense clearer, because in Dean's Case the interval between the last employment in the noxious process and the disablement was only four weeks. On the other hand, the workman in Dean's Case had in the interval obtained work

of a different kind from other employers, so that the argument maintained for the appellant in M'Taggart's Case was not open.

J. S. M.

IRISH CASES.

The current of authority as to the validity of gifts for the benefit of monastic communities shows some change. A generation ago, such a case as In re Greene ([1914], 1 Ir. R. 305), would probably have been differently decided. When cases turn upon notions as to public policy, or as to "the policy of a statute," modifications in popular sentiment and even changes in judicial personnel do produce an effect upon the decisions.

In the

The statute is the Roman Catholic Relief Act (10 Geo. 4, c. 7), which imposes penalties upon the admission of persons into a monastic order in the United Kingdom, and (by sect. 29) makes it a misdemeanour for a member of such an order to come to or be within the kingdom. present case a testator gave part of his residue for "the decoration and improvement of the church of the Carmelite Fathers" in Dublin. That is admittedly a society bound by monastic vows; but the Court held that there was a valid charitable bequest not void under the Act. In coming to that conclusion, the Master of the Rolls had to consider a number of Irish cases, from Carbery v. Cox (3 Ir. Ch. R. 231) to Cussen v. Hoynes ([1906], 1 Ir. R. 539). Most of these had already been considered by Joyce, J., in In re Smith ([1914], I Ch. 937), a decision which encouraged the Master of the Rolls in approaching afresh a question which had been assumed, perhaps hastily, to be concluded by authority. Put briefly, the leading points in his judg ment were these: a bequest of this kind is in itself charitable, and if it is to be held invalid, that can only be because the

church is the property of a monastic community. The Roman Catholic Relief Act only intended to subject members of such communities to the specific criminal penalties which it imposed, and not to other unspecified penalties in the shape of civil disabilities. Such members may be appointed to administer a charity, if the charitable object itself is lawful, as for example, the object of affording the means of public worship. It is not the policy of the statute absolutely to disable monastics from acquiring property.

Of course, any Court which has to consider this matter at the present day must be influenced by the fact that the penal prohibitions of the statute have for many years been allowed to become a dead letter. The indirect enforcement of a statute which is not directly enforced is not an agreeable sort of judicial action. No doubt, however, a gift directly intended to promote the admission of persons into such an order, or directly for the support of its members, must still be held void.

It is curious that there had been no earlier decision of the net point which arose in Hamilton v. Clancy ([1914], 2 Ir. R. 514). A telegram is handed in to a sub-postmaster at a branch office; he has to telephone its contents to a main-line office, whence they are telegraphed in the ordinary way. He is negligent in sending the telephonic message, so that a wrong figure gets into the telegram, and the sender thereby suffers damage. Is the sub-postmaster liable to the sender? The telegram-form contained the usual condition, that the Postmaster-General would not be liable for loss caused by mistake or default; anyhow, Whitfield v. Le Despencer (2 Cowp. 745) decided long since that no action lies against the Postmaster-General for his servant's negligence. But the Court were of opinion that the sub-postmaster, in