ingratitude of their country, or rather of the niggardly manipulators of its finances who mistake parsimony for economy. Status of Attorney-Generals in Canada. The controversy in England as to the responsibility of the Attorney-General and Solicitor-General for proceedings of the Department which they control, though they may not have been directly consulted, raises in Canada the question of the status of the AttorneyGeneral particularly in the Provinces. It is a matter of large import to the public; and certainly the rights of the Provincial Attorney-General ought to be defined by statutory enactment. In England the Attorney-General on acceding to the office, ceases his private practice; and he is not a member of the Cabinet. In the Provinces of Canada the Attorney-General is the main functionary of the Government, and his position serves to promote or advance the firm or the business with which he is connected in his private capacity. He surrenders nothing in the way of private practice or personal liberty of action; and as of course the private office is largely the receptacle of official overflow, though the Attorney-General may visit it only now and then. But he is in touch with it all the time, and frequently appears in Court as the advocate of the actions carried on by it and as the advocate, often enough, of cases for other private litigants who retain his services more because he is Attorney-General than because of any pre-eminence he possesses as an advocate or as a man. The influences of the position in legal affairs which cannot possibly be transacted officially are tremendous. I have one instance before me of an Attorney-General of one of the Provinces the offices of whose private practice, or rather of the firm of which he was the chief member, were the constant resort of promoters of illusory projects which they wished put into legal form for "boosting." The name had a money value for the promoter; he got it by employing the firm. and The Attorney-General may have been innocent of all this; but nevertheless this was the effect of his continuing his private practice. The Attorney-General in Canada should be excluded from all private practice, directly or indirectly, either as a solicitor or counsel, and his name should be dropped out of any firm with which before his appointment he was associated. This will accord him the best part of the Lord's Prayer "Lead us not into temptation." A Notable Lawyer Passes. The death of Z. A. Lash, K.C., LL.D., at the age of 74, is one of those inevitables of life which cause a halt and a reflection; and particularly is this so to the men of the Legal Profession which has just been bereft of a member conspicuous alike for sterling ability and untarnished integrity. Mr. Lash was not merely a successful lawyer by profession. He was a man of culture; and in his studies of law he found those mental gratifications which come to the analyst of a science, but not to the mere accumulator of facts. Mr. Lash was in truth pre-eminent among a great constellation of legal luminaries of his time. Nor did his legal avocations and studies entirely absorb him. His activities were diversified and wide; and he was conspicuously identified with many great financial and industrial enterprises designed to advance his country's welfare. To them all he brought that clearness of judgment which made him a notable factor in the success which most of them have already achieved. Fama semper vivat! Sir Glenholme Falconbridge. The Bench and Bar of Ontario have lost in the death of Sir Glenholme Falconbridge an eminent Judge and an erudite jurist. Since 1900 he had been Chief Justice of the King's Bench, and for many years before attaining that eminence he had been puisne Judge. He was 74 at the time of his death, and had been in active participation in the Law, as Barrister and Judge, for 50 years. Those who revered and those who admired him will be consoled by the thought that he leaves a life's record of true service and devotion to the time in which his lot was cast not only untarnished but of real splendour and greatness. Sir Glenholme was one of the class of men now becoming fewer in number, who maintained through life a close connection with Literature, and he was the author and editor of many prose works, legal and literary, and also of metrical translations of Greek, Latin and German. His knowledge of these languages was intimate but not more so than it was of several other modern languages. Scholarship was in fact the strong bent of his mind; and scholarship consequently is reflected in the luminous decisions which through a long series of years have been rendered by him in the most subtle and complex matters of Law and fact. In the comprehension of facts-that rare faculty of eliminating everything except the material- he had an inherent, intuitive power far beyond the mere discernments of logical relationships. He seemed to reach the vitals of a problem a pas de géant, and the brambles of irrelevancies which the antagonists had gathered for presentation, were left unscanned and merely as a memento of their diligence. His family and social relationships with the Law are phenomenal. He and Sir Thomas and Sir Charles Moss married three daughters of the late Hon. Robert B. Sullivan, who was a Chief Justice of Upper Canada. The three husbands each ascended the Ontario Bench; and three of the daughters of Sir Glenholme Falconbridge have married members of the legal profession, while his only son, John D. Falconbridge, is a barrister of distinction and an author of several legal works of a high and authoritative standard. The versatility of the father, the piquancy of expression and the power of condensing words to exact thoughts, seem to have been transmitted to the son, so that the name so honoured in the present is not likely to lose its lustre in the coming generation. Passed to the shades of the upright and brave; His deeds do not pass to the vault or the grave. ANSON ON CONTRACT. BY JOHN S. EWART, K.C. To the frequently repeated assertion that "Anson on Contract" is the best book on the subject, I have for many years replied, "Possibly, but what a distressingly humiliating confession." We are now up to the third American edition. It is based either upon the fourteenth English edition-according to the title-page -or upon the twelfth-according to the preface. Immaterial. Plenty learning there is. Plenty industry. Plenty phraseologies which ought long ago to have been discarded. Some useful analysis. Little attempt at synthesis. No effort at the eradication of timedishonoured grotesqueries. The whimsies of the "authorities" (Authorities always impede progress) once more treated with uncritical adoration. Quasi-contracts-Certain heterogeneous classes of cases, which have in common conspicuously this—that they are not contracts—are huddled together, put into a class, and called quasi-contracts-by translation, as-if-contracts (sections 8; 271-3; 402; 475). The book tells us that the term is "convenient" (sec. 8). I call it stupid, or, at best, slipshod. Why we should group "a multifarious class of legal relations" (in none of which agreement is ever a constituent factor) under the word contract (from which agreement is never absent), or under the meaningless phrase as-if contracts, is something beyond my comprehension. Do not refer me to by-gone days when none of the terms was understood. I am speaking of the third American, based upon the twelfth or fourteenth English, edition of "Anson on Contracts." Are ancient crudities entitled to greater respect than modern? Is not the ashpit the proper place for old and young alike? Unilateral Contracts-Another kind of contracts which does not exist (I plead the book) is unilateral contracts (sec. 24). A unilateral contract is as unthinkable |