transmitting the telegram, was acting as a public officer, and in the discharge of a public duty, and that therefore his negligence did give the sender a right of action against him personally. "The very fact that his superiors are not responsible distinguishes the case from mere private agencies, and lets in the doctrine of the subordinates' personal responsibility." The nearest authority was another eighteenthcentury case-Rowning v. Goodchild (2 W. Bl. 906) - on the refusal of a postmaster to deliver a letter except on payment of an illegal charge.

In Lecky v. Walter ([1914], 1 Ir. R. 378) we have a neat illustration of certain well-known principles that an innocent misrepresentation neither gives the person deceived any right of action for damages, nor any right of rescission after conveyance. Bonds of a company having property in America were purchased on the faith of a representation that the bonds were a charge on that property. In fact, they were not, but the representation was made innocently. The transaction having been completed by a legal transfer of the bonds, the Court refused to set it aside. Two circumstances only will enable a purchaser in such a case to obtain rescission after the property has been conveyed to him. One is fraud: Wilde v. Gibson (1 H. L. C., at p. 632), “If a conveyance is executed, a Court of Equity will set it aside. only on the grounds of actual fraud." The other is total failure of consideration; that is, that the purchaser does not get the substantial thing which he bargained for. Here he wanted bonds, and he got bonds; they were not so good as he thought, but still they could not be said to be a totally different kind of thing from what he expected.

Cases upon the effect of the moratorium are, it may be hoped, of only passing interest; but the Irish Courts, like

the English, had much to do with it while it lasted. The leading Irish decisions are grouped under the heading of Gramophone Co. v. King ([1914], 2 Ir. R. 535), and were certainly severe upon a plaintiff who, often inadvertently, had issued a writ in a "moratorium case," while the period of delay was running. The attitude of the King's Bench Division was, that that was a period of "statutory credit"not a mere postponement of payment but a postponement of the debt. Hence a plaintiff was not entitled to judgment, even though the defendant entered no appearance: and on the facts being brought before the Court it would either dismiss the action or take the writ off the file. If judgment had been inadvertently marked in the office, the Court would set it aside without obliging the defendant to institute a motion for that purpose.

It was decided in Volkl v. Rotunda Hospital ([1914], 2 Ir. R. 543) that an alien enemy, who is registered under the Aliens Restriction Act 1914, and has a permit under which he is residing in a prohibited area in the United Kingdom, may sue in our Courts during the war. His enemy status is for the time being removed, so far as his right of action is concerned. There is an English decision to the same effect: Thurn & Taxis v. Moffet (31 T. L. R. 24).

J. S. B.

243

Reviews.

[SHORT NOTICES DO NOT PRECLUDE reviews at GREATER
LENGTH IN SUBSEQUENT ISSUES.]

Select Bills in Eyre. A. D. 1292-1333. Edited for the Selden Society. By W. C. BOLLAND. London: Bernard Quaritch. 1914.

In The Eyre of Kent, Vol. II, Mr. Bolland drew attention to the remarkable procedure by Bills in Eyre, not hitherto observed, which was introduced for the prompt disposal of the suits of poor persons, thus throwing back to a much earlier period the origin of suits in forma pauperis. The present volume contains a selection of Bills in Eyre or Petitions in forma pauperis from the Eyres of Shropshire of 20 Edward I; of Staffordshire of 21 Edward I; of Lincolnshire of 14 Edward I; of Derbyshire of 4 Edward III; of Bills before the Justices in the Channel Islands of 2 Edward II and at Berwickupon-Tweed of 7 Edward III. The Bills here published total 175. Those relating to the Channel Islands deal with various complaints of oppression and other wrongs committed by Sir Otes Grandison, the administrator appointed by Edward I and by the Justices in Eyre and Commissioners of "Quo Warranto," despatched by that monarch and his son; who, disregarding the exemption from English law hitherto enjoyed by the islanders, "wrested from them rights and hereditaments of which they and their ancestors had held peaceable enjoyment for generations." Eventually all these Petitions were ordered to be presented at Westminster-another breach of the islanders' privileges-either in person or by some one person representing them all, constituting an early example of a test case, and the probable employment of counsel. The Bills from Berwickupon-Tweed were presented to determine the right to lands which had been seized by Robert Bruce and granted by him to his supporters, of which the King of England had taken possession after the Battle of Halidon Hill, in 1333. In this instance, the Commission appointed by Edward III appears to have done its work promptly and equitably. The great bulk of the Bills-157 in all — are from the counties named above, and cover a wide range of subjects of paramount interest to the legal historian. No misfeasance or non-feasance was too slight or too grave to be the subject of complaint in a Bill in Eyre. "The recovery of debts, large and small, and the enforcement of contracts were sought for

by them. Damages were claimed by them for detinue, breach of contract, trespass, negligence, illegal distress, wrongful imprisonment, for abduction of ward, for conspiracy to deceive the Court and to prevent the course of justice, and for almost every other tortious act or omission by which a man might be endamaged." As might be anticipated, these Bills contain much valuable evidence relating to provincial life, social and economic, and of provincial manners and customs prevalent in the 13th and 14th centuries. From one we learn that a branch of the Chancery, whence writs were obtainable, was temporarily established in the county in which an Eyre was sitting or about to sit. From another, the view expressed by the present writer in the pages of this Review that law schools were in existence in London in the 13th century with the power of conferring degrees in the Faculty of Law, is confirmed. The full text of the Bills, with a translation, together with the endorsements on the Bills and the existing subsidiary documents connected with them, as well as the relevant records in the Eyre and other rolls are also given in full. In his scholarly Introduction, which places Mr. Bolland in the front rank of legal historians, the learned Author deals with the derivations of the term Bill, rejecting the suggestions of The Oxford English Dictionary that it is derived from bulla and deriving it from bibillus," a little book," with a secondary meaning of "a petition"; with the authority of the Eyre; with the presentation, language and contents of the Bills; with the failure for their prosecution to an issue, and the reasons for such failure; with the meaning of the endorsements; and generally, with the various legal, historical, social, economic, philological and critical questions arising from a consideration of the Bills contained in this volume.

Mens Rea, or Imputability under the Law of England. By D. A. STROUD, LL.D. London: Sweet & Maxwell.

1914.

This is an exceedingly able treatise upon an exceedingly thorny and complicated subject, which has earned for the Author the degree of Doctor of Laws of the University of London. It has been written with the double purpose of presenting a comprehensive view of the main principles of imputability and of furnishing a practical guide to the Statute and Case law in which those principles have been adopted. After dealing with general principles in the opening chapter, such as intuition, Dr. Stroud discusses imputability in detail under the main heads of ignorance, infancy, insanity, drunkenness, active negligence, criminal omissions, constructive crime, compulsion,

coercion, and occasional licence. There is no more difficult question in the administration of the criminal law than that of determining the sanity or insanity of the accused. Under the title of insanity and also under that of compulsion, Dr. Stroud writes with the utmost lucidity and illumination. In the former he treats the expression usual in directions to the juries an offence against the laws of God and nature" as quite out of date. There never was, he explains, a law of nature, and the Divine law has long ceased to have any close connection with the law of the land. The real test is, whether the accused is capable of judging the character of his act, under the law of the land. In the latter title Dr. Stroud discusses with conspicuous ability the controversial question of whether lack of self control or irresistible impulse, which he terms morbid criminality, should be accepted as an excuse for crime. He finds little difficulty in showing that this question must be answered in the negative. As has been well said, urgent evil desires do not make a man helpless; they only make him wicked. The law as it now stands refuses to recognise wickedness as a ground of immunity from punishment.

Local Government, 1913—1914. Edited by A. MACMORRAN, K.C., M.A., and K. M. MACMORRAN, M.A., LL.B. London: Butterworth & Co. 1914.

Since the publication in 1908 of their Encyclopædia of Local Government, the Publishers of this work have issued supplementary volumes, of which, the one before us, is the fifth. This volume contains the statutes, forms, orders, cases, and decisions of the Local Government Board relating to the subjects discussed in the Encyclopædia, and covers the period from September 1st 1913 to September 1st 1914. The arrangement follows the same line as its predecessors, but the even tenor of its course has been somewhat broken by the consequences of the war. Several statutes, due to this cause, although as we hope of merely a temporary character, have been rightly inserted in their appropriate place, and Government publications relating to exceptional measures arising out of the same cause will be found in extenso. Under the title of "Summary Proceedings," the Criminal Justice Administration Act 1914 treated at length, although strictly it does not appertain to "local government." The annotations on the statutes, orders and memoranda, converts this book from a mere compilation into a work of authority.