2. Also, held, that the hides were equally the property of S. & Co., if purchased with proceeds of drafts not accepted by S. & Co., they becoming debtors either to the estate of the bankrupt or the bank advancing the money; and that the title to the leather passes, when completed, under the arrangement for the purchase of the hides. Safford v. Burgess, 16 N. B. R. (Vt. Dist.) 402.

3. Where a sale of stock, held as collateral, is bought in by the creditor, it will be set aside upon the ground of inadequacy of price, and a resale ordered. -In re Bousfield, 16 N. B. R. (N. D. Ohio) 481.

SECURED DEBT.- See COMPOSITION, 2, 3.

SET-OFF.

1. Upon the bankruptcy of a depositor in a bank, his deposit becomes a security for the payment of the bankrupt's debt to the bank; but if the bank held mere contingent debts or liabilities, or a claim for unliquidated damages arising by contract, the deposit must be left in its hands until it could be ascertained what its probable debts would be, and then it might be used in setoff. In re North, 16 N. B. R. (Mass. Dist.) 420.

2. The bankrupt in a composition case stands, as to set-off, in the position of an assignee, if none has been appointed. — Ibid.

3. The deposit of a bankrupt in a bank is to be set off against the aggregate debt of the bank, not including any notes upon which the bankrupt is surety, unless the principals are insolvent. - Ibid.

STATE COURTS. See ASSIGNEE, 7; JURISDICTION, 2, 7, 8; Mortgage, 3.

STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS.

The rule, under the Statute of Limitations of the State of Illinois, that it does not begin to run until the preference is discovered, does not apply to proceedings under the bankrupt law; but creditors are obliged to be vigilant in ascertaining whether other creditors have been given a preference or not; and if they do not ascertain that fact within the limited time fixed by the bankrupt law, the preference will stand. - In re Hamlin, 16 N. B. R. (N. D. Ill.) 522. See PLEADINGS, 5.

Funds in the hands of an assignee are subject to State taxation. — In re Mitchell, 16 N. B. R. (Mass. Dist.) 535.

1. Where money was put in trust, the income to be paid to the bankrupt during his life, for the support of himself and wife, and for the support and education of their children, the annuity and principal both to be inalienable, and not subject to their debts or control, the bankrupt takes it as sub-trustee,

and is bound to apply it to the purposes named in the trust; and it will not therefore pass to his assignee in bankruptcy. - Durant v. Mass. Hospital Life Ins. Co., 16 N. B. R. (Dist. Mass.) 324.

2. The court cannot apportion such income and give the assignee an aliquot part. — Ibid.

The failure of a bankrupt to claim an exemption is to be deemed a waiver thereof. - Steele v. Moody, 16 N. B. R. (Sup. Ct. Ala.) 558.

WORKMEN. See PRIVILEGED Debts.

BOOK NOTICES.

Reminiscences and Anecdotes of Daniel Webster. By PETER HARVEY. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co. 1877.

No Bostonian needs to be informed about Mr. Peter Harvey. A goodnatured, but vain man, of not very strong sense, he became early in life personally acquainted with Mr. Webster; and, although young enough to be his son, and having neither by education nor by pursuits much in common with him, a friendship grew up between the two of the true Johnson and Boswell type. Mr. Harvey's admiration, or rather adoration, of his great friend was at first the amusement and afterwards the terror of his acquaintances, who dreaded his introduction of Mr. Webster's name quite as much as Lady Margaret Bellenden's friends did an allusion to his sacred majesty King Charles and his disjune at Tillietudlem; and naturally, on his side, Mr. Webster found Mr. Harvey's adulation gratifying, and, from its disinterested character, at times very useful. He rewarded it by warm expressions of regard and affection, by intimate companionship, and by familiar and seemingly confidential conversations and communications. The death of his idol did not diminish Mr. Harvey's worship. Throughout the remainder of his life, it might be almost said that he lived, moved, and had his being in Mr. Webster. His past intimacy with Mr. Webster he regarded as his great distinction and as his chief claim on the respect of others. Men and things he judged by one standard, -Webster. Mr. Webster having advised him, in 1852, to vote for General Pierce, for the rest of his days he was a submissive Democrat. Mr. Webster having, during the last years of his life, bitterly opposed the Northern feeling about slavery and those who represented it, the war, the emancipation proclamation, reconstruction, still found Mr. Harvey standing on the compromise measures of 1850, and regarding the Lincolns and Andrews, the Sewards, Chases, and Sumners, as unscrupulous agitators or bigoted fanatics. It is not to be supposed that so enthusiastic a worshipper would leave behind him (for he did not live to witness its publication) a very discriminating eulogy of his friend. Although every thing which even his partiality could not regard as creditable to Mr. Webster is glossed over, denied, or suppressed, he was too blind not to relate more than one incident that redounds little to the honor of his hero. Thus, Mr. Webster's endeavors to procure for General Pierce the support of his personal and political friends, and his extraordinary insolence of behavior when the city government refused the use of Faneuil Hall to his friends, in 1851, and then retracted, are told with the most childlike candor. But we are, on the other hand, assured that Mr. Webster was strictly temperate; that "he would sometimes take with his dinner a glass of wine or two, but was not in the habit of drinking at other times;" and his improvidence in money matters and selfish indifference to his debts, which

were not far removed from dishonesty, are spoken of as want of success “in accumulating a large fortune; "indifference to wealth;" intrusting "his pecuniary affairs too implicitly to the skill and good faith of agents;" "his habitual liberality; " and so forth and so forth.

Of the literary merits of the book it is difficult to speak very favorably. Its publication was superintended by a gentleman of literary taste and experience, and it therefore is free from the flippancy, the marks of haste, and the slovenliness of preparation which characterize Mr. Parker's Reminiscences of Mr. Choate; but in interest and value it does not rank above that astonishing work. If we attempted to describe it in one word, we should call it flat. It is far more difficult to tell an anecdote in print than to tell one orally; and many good story-tellers, as, for instance, Lord Eldon, have failed when they attempted it. Mr. Harvey is not more successful. His anecdotes are generally spoiled in the relation, and the point of many of them is entirely lost. Many of the legal ones, it is apparent, he never understood. Lawyers will smile at being told that Dartmouth College was chartered by Lord Dartmouth, and that Mr. Webster cited a case as occurring "in the third year of Lord Eldon in Chancery." Many well-known anecdotes are so mangled, that we hardly recognize them as old acquaintances. Some have a decidedly apocryphal appearance, and we are firmly convinced that the one about Webster's quarrel with Mr. Pinkney, told on pp. 119-122, has little or no foundation in fact. So far as we can learn, no other of Mr. Webster's friends ever heard of it. Whatever may have been his faults, we do not believe he would have been guilty of so unjustifiable and cowardly a piece of bullying; and it sufficiently proves Mr. Harvey's infatuation, that, even if it were true, he could tell the story as one creditable to Mr. Webster. The pleasantest part of the work is the account of Mr. Webster's rural life. That Mr. Webster loved nature, and that he took the greatest pleasure in his farming and his country amusements at Marshfield and Franklin, is well known to all acquainted with his life: but how much he loved country pursuits; how completely he could unbend when engaged in them, surrounded by his intimate friends and his country neighbors; and how kindly and joyous his life then was, we did not fully realize until we had the aid of Mr. Harvey's book. For this reason, perhaps, Mr. Webster's friends may pardon the mistaken affection which prompted its publication; but, as a whole, reading it must be, we should imagine, a sore trial of their tempers.

The time probably has not yet come for a just estimate of Mr. Webster's ability and character. His great qualities seem fairly to have stunned his contemporaries; and the influence of them is to-day so great, that, in many circles, any criticism of him, intellectually, politically, or morally, will not be listened to with patience, or even with temper. His imposing presence, his personal magnetism, his great powers of persuading and convincing others, early gave him an ascendancy in Boston and among a certain class in New York and Washington, which carried him triumphantly through many difficulties, made up for some grievous mistakes, and enabled him to defy the public indignation at his sad tergiversation in 1850. His notorious faults were not excused: they were vehemently denied. His selfishness was extolled as selfrespect; his arrogance, as dignity; his ambition, as patriotism; his rather

ostentatious declarations of his veneration for the Christian religion, as personal piety. We doubt whether any human being not on a throne, or the heir to one, ever received in his lifetime so much adulation; and this adulation was not the adulation of the mob, but of the wealthy, the intellectual, and the cultivated classes, -the flattery of those whom the rest of the world flattered. Without making allowance for this remarkable fact, his career and position cannot be fully understood. It accounts for many of his faults and of his shortcomings; for it is not in human nature to live as he did in the atmosphere of flattery for many years, and not become in part corrupted by it. It made a man naturally proud, selfish and arrogant to a degree seldom if ever reached by other American statesmen; and it nursed his ambition not only until his elevation to the presidency became his own ruling desire, as it has been of many other statesmen, but until he haughtily considered that it should be the ruling policy and constant endeavor of everybody else. Like Mr. Clay in Kentucky, he would, in Massachusetts, brook no rival; and naturally, in course of time, many of the Whig leaders in the State found his domineering spirit difficult to bear, while others conscientiously differed from him on many questions of public policy. Those among them who refused to submit to his dictation he and his friends treated with extraordinary intolerance. "Webster Whigs," as they are still called, refuse to the present time to believe that, in differing from Mr. Webster, the Davises, Lawrences, Dexters, and Winthrops of the day were actuated by other than selfish motives, or guilty of less than gross ingratitude.

Many are still eager to believe that Mr. Webster's action in 1850, about slavery, was sincere; and Mr. Evarts, in his speech at the recent unveiling of a statue of Webster in New York, which is printed in an Appendix to Mr. Harvey's book, goes so far as to declare it consistent with his entire political life. It is inconceivable to us how any one who compares his speech on the 7th of March, 1850, and those made afterwards, with his speeches in 1840, in 1844, or even in 1848, can assert this. There, of course, might consistently have been a change, because the situation had somewhat changed; but the change which strikes us most strongly is not a change of situation or of measures, but an entire change of feeling and of principle. We must say this, after making every allowance for the difficulties of his position; after fully admitting that he, in common with Mr. Choate, Mr. Everett, and many other Northern statesmen who were then unjustly sneered at as Union-savers, foresaw what most people did not foresee, that the continued agitation of the slavery question must result in civil war, and naturally shrank from so terrible a catastrophe. The South were the aggressors in 1850, just as much as they were twenty years earlier; and Mr. Webster's public life would have been brought to an untimely close had he, in 1830, spoken in the spirit or tone that he assumed when discussing the compromise measures.

He had early caught, in its worst form, the presidential disease; and, not aware that, unlike Jefferson, Jackson, and Clay, he was not a great popular leader, and had but a slight hold on the common people, he saw with ill-concealed jealousy the successive nominations of others as the Whig candidates for the executive chair. This was very apparent in 1844; and, in 1848, his anger was so great as to cause him to coquet for a moment with those Free