COMMUNICATIONS SOLICITED. Contributions, items of news about courts, judges and lawyers; queries or comments, criticisms on various law questions; addresses on legal topics, or discussions upon points of interest, as well as mportant decisions. are solicited from members of the bar and those interested in legal proceedings. Decisions from each of the Judges in the District Courts of Minnesota are urgently solicited.

IMPORTANT DECISIONS.

In addition to the monthly publication of a digest of the cases decided by the supreme court of Minnesota, we will in each number of the Journal publish brief abstracts of the most important decisions of the courts of last resort in all of the other states. References will be made to the National Reporters, where the cases are published, as well as to the Lawyers' Reports Annotated. In the Lawyers' Reports Annotated most of the cases are very exhaustively annotated, and in the citation of cases reported in that valuable series attention will be called to such annotations. The value of these two working digests of recent cases will increase as the numbers of the Journal accumulate, and we feel confident that our subscribers will appreciate our efforts to make the Minnesota Law Journal a sine qua non to the practicing awyer in this state.

DISTRICT COURT DECISIONS.

We desire to repeat our request that attorneys throughout the state who try cases in which new points of law are raised, especially in matters of practice, will send us a statement of the facts, and a list of the cases cited to sustain the points made by counsel. We can generally obtain a copy of the decision of the judge, but without other data a case cannot be properly

reported. Aid us in this matter and you will advance your own interests, and that of your brother lawyers.

PRECISION OF DEFINITION AND
STATEMENT.

The late Mr. Justice Bradley, of the United States supreme court, in an address to the graduating class of a law school, used the following forcible language:

"There is no science in which the words and forms of expression are more important than in the law. Precision of definition and statement is a sine qua non. Possessing it, you possess the law; not possessing it, you do not possess the law, but only the power of vainly beating the air. It is of the utmost importance to the student of the law to acquire, besides a knowledge of the law itself, the power of expressing it in correct and appropriate language, such as is found in books of authority. One of the best aids to the accomplishment of which I speak is to choose some author of pure and accurate diction, and make his work a vade mecum, until you have become so familiar with its contents that, although not absolutely committed to memory, the words and forms of expression will spontaneously suggest themselves whenever you begin to speak or write on the subject. Of course, there can be no doubt what book should be chosen for this purpose. There is nothing to compare with Sir William Blackstone in completeness of scope, purity and elegance of diction, and appositeness, if not always absolute accuracy, of definition and statement. One of the if greatest, not the greatest, of forensic speakers, as well as lawwas that I ever knew, yers, the late Mr. George Wood, of New York-in his early days a leader of the bar of New York. I have often hung upon his lips with chained attention, even when opposed to him in a case, and can truly say that I never enjoyed a greater intellectual treat than in listening to his arguments. Now I happen to have heard an account of the method which he pursued for acquiring his wonderful command of choice judicial diction. It was his custom for many years to read a

chapter of Blackstone of a morning, and then take a long walk and repeat to himself all that he could remember of what he had read, even to the very words and phrases in those parts that were important, such as definitions and the like......and in this way he went through the commentaries until they were perfectly mastered, both in matter and form, so that he became almost a walking commentary himself. His case illustrates the oft-repeated injunction, "Beware of the man with one book," and when the one book mastered in this way is such a book as Blackstone's Commentaries, it is easy to comprehend what power and beauty may be acquired and laid by for future use in the display of forensic eloquence."

DEPARTMENT STORES.

Judge John A. Jameson, the learned author of "Constitutional Conventions," delivered a paper before the Illinois State Bar Association in January, 1892, wherein he discussed as one of the chief pro.lems of our time, the question, "How, without violating essential rights of property, to regulate the accumulation and use of capital, so as to make them consistent with public safety?"

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After .scussing ancient and modern monopolies, he mentioned the monster retail dry goods establishments, which at that time had not yet reached their full development, and which flourish under the name of "department stores." "A monster retail dry goods establishment in the center of a town inevitably works disaster to smaller stores. A butter or cheese factory, in a farming district, stops the diversified industries of the country dairies for miles around. Great manufacturers of clothing, of shoes, of agricultural implements, employing machinery, and large numbers of workmen, discourage the trades of the tailor, the shoemaker, and the blacksmith, as carried on in the good old times, when each artificer was skilled in every branch of his craft, and give us, insteau, mere fractional men, who can peg or sew, but cannot make a boot, or who can fasten on the buttons or insert the pockets, but can neither cut nor finish a coat. These evil consequences which, I admit, are attended by some compensations, and which are of such a nature that no regulation can wholly avert them, touch the economical or industrial condition of the country."

Judge Jameson, in answer to the possible argument that the attempt to

regulate and, more especially, to restrict the accumulation of persons engaged in private business, would be morally wrong, and impracticable, gave as a reply that nothing is wrong which is necessary. As to the question of the practicability of such measures, he answered, when the people are determined that monopolies shall be abated, they will go down "lawfully if they may, unlawfully if they must." "When the people are in earnest, governments usually find ways and means, because those which will not, perish, and others that will, succeed them."

The writer of the paper was unable to advocate any scheme of remedial measures to secure these rights, but he believed that the claim is not without solid foundation. With warning voice, he insisted that the claim has to be met and to a reasonable extent allowed. "For governments to meet it frankly, fairly and early, is a duty transcending in importance and gency any that can be named."

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The importance of this matter has not abated since these warning words were delivered. The present unrest against trusts, monopolies and department stores, is only the forerunner of some great movement of the future which may uproot constitutions and

statutes.

POLICE POWERS AND THE FOUR

TEENTH AMENDMENT.

The authors of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States did not dream of the wide sweep which has since been given to it by the courts. Every conceivable argument has been pressed into service to make the amendment applicable to legislation which applies to classes, under the claim that such legislation is partial and arbitrary. But the police power of the states has thus far been sacredly protected by the supreme court, whenever an attempt was made to subordinate it to the great amendment. A late example of such extreme claim appears in a review of a Utah decision made in reference to a state statute, creating a liability for damages done by herd drivers on a highway along a hillside. Jones v. Brim, February 1, 1897. The law under consideration belongs to that class which creates a conclusive presumption of negligence from a particular state of facts, and for which exists a reasonable necessity, or, as

Mr. Justice White happily states it. it is but "an illustration of the. power to classify." The denial of the equal protection of the laws was asserted to consist in an unjust and illegal discrimination between drivers of herds and others, who use the highway without such liability.

Mr. Justice White (who is now deemed one of the ablest members of the bench) delivered a clearly conceived statement, overruling the claim of the driver of a band of sheep, who had been compelled to pay the sum of $10 as such damages.

"We premise," said the Court, "that the clause of the fourteenth ameudment of the constitution referred to was undoubtedly intended to ́prohibit an arbitrary deprivation of life or liberty, or arbitrary spoilation of property. Barbier v. Connolly, 113 U. S. 53, 5 Sup. Ct. 371. But it does not limit, nor was it designed to limit, the subjects upon which the police power of a state may be lawfully exerted. Railway Co. v. Beckwith, 129 U. S. 29, 9 Sup. Ct. 207. Embraced within the police powers of a state is the establishment, maintenance, and control of public highways. New Orleans Gaslight Co. v. Louisiana Light & Heat Producing & Manufacturing Co., 115 U. S. 661, 6 Sup. Ct. 252. The legislation in question would clearly seem, therefore, to come within the narrowest definition of the police power, and be properly classed as a reasonable regulation incident to the right to estabush and maintain such highways. The statute is analogous in principle to the one considered in the case of Railway Co. v. Mathews (decided at this term), 165 U. S. 1, 17 Sup. Ct. 243, wherein it was held that a law of Missouri was valid which made every railroad corporation owning or operating a railroad in the state absolutely responsible in damages for the property of any person injured or destroyed by fire communicated by its locomove engines. That decision was based upon the right of a state, in the exercise of its police power, to classify occupations with relation to their peculiar liability to cause injury to property, from the dangerous nature of the implements employed in the business. The legislation here in ques

tion undoubtedly proceeds upon this theory. The statute was manifestly not designed to impose a liability upon the owners of herds for damage occasioned by the mere passage of a drove of animals over a hillside road. If these herds were kept in the road, the banks would not be caved, or rocks rolled into the traveled way. The damage contemplated must therefore be occasioned by animals going outside the beaten roadway. In effect, the legislature declared that the passage of droves or herds of animals over a hillside highway was so likely, if great precautions were not observed, to result in damage to the road, that, where this damage followed such driving, there ought to be no troversy over the existence or non-existence of negligence, but that there should be an absolute legal presumption to that effect, resulting from the fact of having driven the herd."-National Corporation Reporter.

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TAXING INTERSTATE EXPRESS COM

PANIES.

By a bare majority the Supreme Court of the United States has just decided a group of cases sustaining the Ohio and Indiana statutes for the taxation of express companies. The opinions, to be published under the title of Sanford v. Poe, hold that a state in taxing the personal property of an interstate express company within that state may consider the whole property of the company as a single profit-producing plant, taking into consideration the value of its capital stock as an element of the value of the property, and that for the purpose of determining the value of that portion of the plant which it has within the state intangible as well as tangible property, including contracts for transportation facilities, may be taken into account. This is declared not to be a taxation of interstate commerce or of property outside the state.

The immense increase of taxes made by these laws is illustrated by one case in which on a return of $23,430, made by the company as the valuation of its personal property in the state, the assessment was $499,373.60. The gross receipts of that company in the

state for one year amounted to $275,446.

*

In support of the theory that the property of such a company may, like that of a railroad, telegraph, or telephone system, be regarded as a unit, and in answer to the contention by the express company that its taxable personal property in the state consisted only of horses, wagons, and other specific items of tangible property, Chief Justice Fuller says: "Considered as distinct subjects of taxation a horse is indeed a horse; a wagon, a wagon; a safe, a safe; a pouch, a pouch; but how is it that $23,430 worth of horses, wagons, safes, and pouches produce $275,446 in a single year? * The answer is obvious." On the other hand, Mr. Justice White in his ssenting opinion speaks of such unit as a fiction, and says: "The conception of the unity of railroad and telegraph.nes is necessarily predicated upon the physical connection of such property. To apply a rule based upon this condition to the isolated ownership by an express company of movable property in many states in reality declares that a mere metaphysical or intellectual relation between property situated in one state and property found in another creates, as between such property, a close relation for the purposes of taxation." And again: "Certainly the mere fact that the same owner has movable property in one state and movable property in another state does not from the fact of the one ownership create a link of continuity between the property for the purpose of taxation." But is there not something more than a mere metaphysical or intellectual relation between property interests in fferent states when they are all a part of a great system of transportation? Is the plant of an express company any less a unit because it merely hires the use of railroad lines and does not buy them? Do not the railroads in some sense belong to the express companies for all the purposes of the express business so long as the contracts for their use are in force? The owner would be prompt to recognize the unity of the plant in fixing its value for the purpose of a sale. Is that unity any less real when the value is

to be fixed for taxation?-Case and Comment.

HAS THE PHYSICIAN EVER THE RIGHT TO TERMINATE LIFE?

Read before the Medico-Legal Society, Indiana.

Read before the Medico-Legal Society, New York.

(By Clark Bell, Esq., LL. D., President Medico-Legal Congress.) Perhaps no part of the proceedings of the late Medico-Legal Congress held in the Federal Court rooms in the city of New York, September, 1895, gave rise to more criticism than the comments upon this subject introduced by Mr. Albert Bach, of the bar of New York city, and one of the officers of that congress, in the discussion of the papers of Mr. Gustave Boehme, and of Dr. L. Forbes Winslow, on the subject of suicide, in which the author, Mr. Gustave Boehme, had asserted the right of every human being to end his life under certain conditions.

As it is in such cases better to go by the record, I quote from the language used by Mr. Bach in the discussion, from advance sheets of the bulletin of the Medico-Legal Congress:

"The question on the right of a human being to end his own terrestrial life has been frequently mooted. There is opened up, by the mere putting of the question, a broad field of argument-and there have been and are able advocates of both the affirmative and negative sides on the propositions involved. In benalf of the negative side, it has been asserted that God's given life is too sacred to be terminated by the wilfull act of man; that the duty we owe not only to our dependents, but to our fellow beings in general, is too imperative to be shirked by the so-called cowardly act of suicide; that the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," applies as well to the act of self-destruction as to the wrongful slaying of another; that the welfare of humanity at large demands that the continuance of human life should in no way be interfered with by man, unless under sanction of law; and that our laws not only neither permit selfkilling nor recognize any justification therefor, but specifically prohibit it, and provide a punishment for attempted suicide. Those holding the affirmative side of the question contend that under certain circumstances and conditions suicide is justifiable, and in support of their contention they paint and present to us pictures of human suffering so agonizing, so irretrievably

hopeless and irremediable in the light of experience, as to make many waver in their opinion that earthly pains and woes should be forever evidenced, no matter howsoever excruciating, rather than be ended by suicide. The advocates of self-killing cite history to prove that the act in the past, and among certain people at present, has been considered the only honorable, manly anu respectable way to meet defeat or disgrace, and they riuicule those who enact laws providing punishment for attempted suicide, and scoff at such laws as stupid and ineffectual. There is not sufficient time afforded me to make a comprehensive statement of my views on this subject. I will merely say that I deem our statute law appertaining to attempted suicide absuru and farcical, f the reason that it will not deter any one from attempting suicide, and, furthermore, it induces would-be suicides to see to it that their efforts in that direction are entirely successful."

"Personally I can conceive of conditions that would ustify a person in ending his life, and in some instances I am convinced that such self-inflicted death would be beneficial to the community at large. There is considerable cant and hypocrisy connected with the discussion of this subject, but before a scienufic body such as this is, we should express our views fearlessly. I admit that the advocacy of advanced and progressive uoctrine before weakminded persons may do harm, but feel that will not particularly shock any one here present by stating that I believe that there are cases in which suicide is morally justifia.e, and that there are also cases in which the ending of human te by physicians is not only morally right, but an act of humanity. I refer to cases of absolutely known incurable, fatal, and agonizing disease or condition, where death is certain and necessarily attended by excruciating pain, when it is the wish of the victim at a deadly drug should be administered to end his life and terminate his irremediable suffering. And I may add that I know that physicians do so end life, although they term it "producing euthanasia." If tuose very physicians were to use English words rather than their Greek equivalent, we would find them producing an easy, painless death, instead of euthanasia."

These sentiments were met then by Dr. Isaac N. Quimby, of New Jersey, who said:

"I must disagree entirely with the learned jurist in his statements regarding the right of any human being under any circumstances to take his own life-and there are no culmination of circumstances that would justify a