on the facts, as we understand them, quite independently of any possible question as to the sufficiency of the force for the alleged blockade, we do not see that any other course could consistently have been taken. And the action of the Diplomatic Body on this occasion would seem to have been both consonant with the principles of International Law, and most favourable to the early restoration of Peace to a disturbed country.

Representative Government in Western Australia. The acquiescence of the Parliament of the United Kingdom in the Acts passed by the Legislature of Western Australia conferring upon that Colony the power of Responsible Government, is a fact of importance, and of considerable interest as completing the group of selfgoverning Australian Colonies.

The way in which the demand made by Western Australia was met in the House of Commons seems to us to have been in many ways both significant and instructive. It would appear that whatever talk may be indulged in by some Members as to what is called Imperial Federation, there are a good many Representatives in what we are apt to speak of as the Popular Chamber, who are not at all in sympathy with Representative Institutions elsewhere than in this country. It was urged by some Members that the effect of the Bill would be to hand over to some forty thousand scattered Colonists the power over an area as large as Europe. If the area be indeed so large, the absurdity of keeping these Colonists in leading strings might have been, as it was, urged on the other side. We were said to be voluntarily resigning our control over vast territories which we ought to keep in our own hands. Sir George Campbell was angry with the Colonial Office for being willing to let such a territory slip through our fingers, while Mr. Osborne Morgan thought it absurd to

attempt to keep the Colonies in leading strings when they could walk by themselves. The latter view presumably prevailed, since the Colony got what it wanted, and what, on the whole, it seems to have deserved. Mr. Chamberlain, indeed, drew attention to some very remarkable Acts of the local Legislature, which had much the appearance of being ultra vires, in the matter of trying to prevent British subjects from other parts from taking any share in the Pearl Fisheries which constitute one of the industries of Western Australia. This would seem to have been a case of Protection run mad, and Legislation in that sense has a general tendency to defeat its own ends, and to result in something like what is popularly known as cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. But, on the whole, notwithstanding the occurrence of such temporary aberrations, we congratulate Western Australia on having obtained Responsible Government, and we congratulate it still more on the men whom it has selected as the first Administrators of Constitutional Government in a Colony which, as Baron Henry de Worms said, was founded in peace, and for whose defence not a shot has ever been fired.

Reviews.

The Law of Damages: A Treatise on the Reparation of Injuries as Administered in Scotland. By JOHN GUTHRIE SMITH, Sheriff of Aberdeen, Kincardine, and Banff. Second Edition. Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, Law Publishers. 1889.

We were in the first instance not a little misled by the title of this book. We expected to find a Treatise on the mode of arriving at the amount of relief which is usually sought in legal proceedings. Instead of this, we have, what is to all intents and purposes, and in the language of the English Law-a Treatise on Torts. Instead of a subject treated from the standpoint of Sedgwick or Mayne, we have one that enters into competition with Addison or Pollock, or indeed with any of a dozen

more or less known authors; for the subject of Torts has of late years been a very favourite one with text writers. Mr. Guthrie Smith's book is a second edition. His first edition, published many years ago, was a book entitled The Law of Reparation. This word is of exclusive use in Scotch Law, and has almost a technical signification. At any rate, what it connotes is clearly understood. Mr. Guthrie Smith's translation of it has, however, an equally well understood meaning on this side of the Tweed, and the present name for his book is to English readers distinctly misleading. An English purchaser (and we hope Mr. Guthrie Smith will not fail to have many such) would, unless advised beforehand (a business we are now taking upon ourselves), expect on opening the book to find a general discussion of the rule of compensation in Law; he would expect a review of the chief heads of Law from the point of view of compensation and the rules applicable to each of these heads worked out in detail; discussions as to exemplary damages, vindictive damages, nominal, remote, and consequential damages, with a full exposition of the method of their assessment, and the powers exercised by the Courts with regard to them. But this is not what he would find. The only chapter that deals directly with these subjects is Chapter XIV., the last in the book, and which covers no more than twenty pages, a length that—even when we take into account the power of compression which Mr. Guthrie Smith's lucid and pithy style puts him in possession of—is quite insufficient to deal with the subject that Mr. Sedgwick has filled two bulky volumes in discussing, and that Mr. Mayne has not been able to compress into a bulk exceeding that of the whole of Mr. Guthrie Smith's work now before us.

Again, in the body of his book, Mr. Guthrie Smith deals almost exclusively with wrongs independent of Contract. In the chapter on the measure of damages, very little short of half is devoted to matter appropriate to the Law of Contracts, about which, in his book, he elsewhere says not a word.

Treating Mr. Guthrie Smith's work, however, not as a work on Damages in our English sense-but as one on Torts, there are certain very obvious defects that should be noticed. The first is, there seems to be no principle of arrangement at all.

After the third chapter, the rest of the book might be printed anyhow without the slightest sacrifice of method, coherency, or intelligibility. For example: Chapter IV. deals with the Church and the Civil Law; Chapter V., with

Trespass to Person and Property; Chapter VI., with Road and Railway Accidents; Chapter VII., with Collisions at Sea; Chapter VIII., with Fraud; Chapter IX., with Injuries to Land; and Chapter X., with Defamation. Now why these subjects are taken in this particular order we are wholly unable to say. If the order were inverted the sequence would seem to us as good, and if the chapters were shuffled and then dealt out to be printed, there would be no greater impropriety, so far as we are aware, likely to emerge than there is in the order of treatment which the author has seen fit to adopt. The natural way of treatment, we submit, would be first to define the subject to be treated of. If that subject is the Law of Damages, the first thing is to specify in what sense those words are used; then to sub-divide the subject, so that it may be orderly treated. Mr. Guthrie Smith's view, however, is not this. He prints his title "The Law of Damages;" then "Chapter I., Grounds of Responsibility. Examination of the Action from the Pursuer's View. Obligations ex delicto." To us this seems absolutely incoherent. Grounds of Responsibilityfor what? Examination of the Action from the Pursuer's View -whatever the pursuer's view may be, so far the reader knows nothing of either action or pursuer. Again, obligations ex delicto are dropped plump on the reader's toes, so to speak, without the least intimation where we are, what we are about, or how they come into the ambit of our concerns at all; and, so far as we find, there is no attempt anywhere to explain their terminology or to shew why these rather than any other subject, say, for instance, obligations ex contractu, should be discussed here or at all.

When Mr. Guthrie Smith is fairly started with any of the subjects he treats, his course is clear and his treatment felicitous, bearing in mind that his object is to present the most authoritative aspect of the law and not to discuss its bearings, or to raise difficulties in its application. Mr. Guthrie Smith shews that he knows his subject and has studied it in its widest relations. The chapters which we should select as the best specimens of his workmanship are those on Fraud, Defamation, and Master and Servant. These are all models of clear and lucid exposition of complicated branches of law. When he touches on problems not yet solved, or as to which there are two schools of interpretation, as, for instance, on the legal meaning of the maxim Volenti non fit injuria-one of the thorniest of subjects-he shews a mastery of the subject that, did the

occasion serve, we doubt nothing would enable him to investigate satisfactorily the underlying issues, but his purpose is to present the paramount opinion, and this he does with admirable clearness and force. Mr. Guthrie Smith's book does not pretend to analyse and weigh the principles laid down in the cases he cites. He is neither jurisprudential nor philosophic. His aim seems to be expository, and that he succeeds in being in a very marked manner. We have rarely read a law book written in a clearer style, and we consider Mr. Guthrie Smith's treatise peculiarly fitted either for those who are wishful to get up the 'general bearings of any of the subjects he treats on, unencumbered with the mass of detail that will be involved in their minuter study, or for those practitioners who have to advise their clients on the general bearings of cases on the spur of the moment, reserving the more complex manifestations for further looking into or for specialist opinions. The law as laid down is most usually correct. Yet, in our opinion, there are some few exceptions to this; thus, in the earlier part of the book, which is also its weakest part, the authority of Lord Neaves is vouched for what, if we rightly understand it, is a most extraordinary proposition. "I never heard," said Lord Neaves, "of an obligation arising merely ex dominio." At first we were persuaded that we did not rightly appreciate our author, or the learned Judge; but, turning to the Index (which, by the way, is not altogether a satisfactory one), we found the dictum, " Ownership infers no liability;" and a reference to Lord Neaves's dictum. The judgment of Lord Watson in The Henrich Björn, 11 App. Cases 276, may with advantage be studied by any one prone to the credulity, or the provisions of either Part II., or Part VIII., of the Public Health Act for Scotland (30 & 31 Vict., c. 101), viewed in the light of cases of which the English case of The Queen v. Swindon Local Board, 4 Q.B.D. 305, is a sample. These instances, and they are but instances, of a principle which is being most largely and, we think, beneficially adopted in modern law, after all only feebly reflect a principle, that was almost paramount in archaic systems of law. Anyone who is anxious to pursue a train of thought suggested by the subject, may be referred to the very instructive discussion in Mr. Holmes's admirable book, The Common Law, on the significance of deodands. As to the rights arising out of servitude, hypothec, superfices, and emphyteusis (rights to which frequent reference is made in the Civil Law and which are not unknown now) it is almost impossible to persuade