The Law Magazine and Review, in commenting upon the grave difficulties which the State of New York is having with its judges, very wisely and laconically says: "The only remedy which our American brethren can adopt is to pay their judges better, and let them hold office for life. So long as it is far more profitable in every way to be a dealer in second hand clothes, or to keep a second-rate tradesman's shop than to be a judge, so long will complaints of corruption be heard. In this benighted and used up country, we pay our superior judges a minimum of £5,000 a year, give our lord chancellor £10,000, let them all have considerable patronage and power; clothe them with big wigs and wonderful gowns, the former at least ugly and uncomfortable; give them titles of honor; and, when they go on circuit, surround them with the state of a king, with trumpeters, halbertmen, assize service, sheriff's carriage, and all sorts of paraphernalia, all of which is eminently stupid from one point of view, since justice could be quite as well administered by any of the judges in his shirt sleeves, but all of which makes our administration of law pure, and makes it, what, according to Bentham, is of more importance, seem pure; makes our judges entirely independent, and makes the office so highly valued, that the best men in the profession are are willing to take it."

If any thing should be kept secure and free from liability to destruction or deterioration it is the records of legal documents-wills, deeds, judgments, etc.-upon the preservation of which depends the ascertainment of the title to all real estate. And it is not to be wondered at that Judge Pinkney and others of Baltimore are troubled about the safety of the "chancery records" of the circuit court, which have been removed from the court-house, where they were deposited in a fire-proof room, to an old masonic hall lately purchased by the city for court purposes. These records are described to be "of the greatest value" "of nearly twenty years' accumulation" deposited in a "building old, or a mere tinder-box, greatly exposed to the dangers of conflagration." The judge remonstrated against their removal to this insecure depository, and has since directed a memorial to the common council of the city, protesting against allowing them to remain there. But the common council have heeded not thus far. The chancery records of the city of Baltimore are not the only legal records which are unsafely deposited. But, experientia solum docet.

The centennial celebration of the laying of the corner stone of the court-house at Johnstown, N. Y., was celebrated with appropriate ceremonies on Wednesday of last week (26th ultimo). The old town was thronged with visitors, and the old court-house was decorated with the flags of England and America. A portrait of Sir William Johnson was hung within the structure of which he was the founder, and leaning against the grand stand was a coat of arms, formerly belonging to Sir William, with its lion, its unicorn and its Dieu et mon droit. The pleasure of the festival was marred by the incessant rain, but the programme, for the most part, was well carried out. The orator of the occasion was ex-Gov. Horatio Seymour, who delivered an oration replete with historical allusions, and breathing a spirit of reverence for the old monuments which may be said, from their associations, to belong to the people. With him we "trust that this celebration will be followed by others in New York, held with a view to the erection of monuments or to bringing out the local histories which shall keep fresh in the mind of our people those events in the past which have shaped its destinies."

NOTES OF CASES.

Cases of damages by fire communicated from locomotives continue to occur; and the courts are constantly called upon to adjudicate nice questions of law relating to negligence and damages in such cases. See ante, vol. 5, pp. 309, 341 and 412. In Rolke v. The Chicago and Northwestern Railway Co., 26 Wis.

537, it was decided that where a fire has been set by a gravel train, which has a large number of men on board who know about the fire, they cannot all go away, leaving the fire to spread and destroy the property of others without being guilty of negligence as to the injured parties. Judge Cole, in delivering the opinion of the court in this case, said: "It appears that the train in question was a gravel train, engaged in the repair of the road-bed and had about twenty-eight men on the train. And even if it had been prudent and necessary to the train itself to move off to the proper station as soon as it was unloaded, in order to avoid collision with other trains, what difficulty was there in leaving behind a sufficient number of men to put out the fire? It was a dry time in the summer, when a fire kindled upon the track of the road would very likely spread to the adjoining premises. Men of ordinary care would, under such circumstances, use proper diligence to prevent the fire from communicating to the property of others." But the judge very properly observed that his reasoning had reference very much to the character or kind of train, and that, in the case of a passenger train, or even an ordinary freight train, it might be hazardous and imprudent to stop

the train and put out a fire thus kindled, or leave behind any one for that purpose.

In this case it will be noticed that the fire was set by the engine of the gravel train and was so known to be set by the employees of the company on the train; but we do not see that this fact rendered it any the more the duty of the employees on such a train to get off and put out the fire than if they had discovered it already set on the company's track by (in all probability) some preceding engine. Negligence in managing a locomotive and in preventing serious consequences arising therefrom may reside not only in the identical agents or employees who have such locomotive in immediate charge, but also in other agents or employees who may witness the consequences of fire communicated by such locomotive. The "agents of the company" in such a case are not simply one set or class of agents, they are all the agents of the company. And if a passenger or freight train should, in passing, set fire to any dry grass or weeds, etc., upon the side of the track, and the employees of such train should not know it, or, knowing it, they should find it impossible or imprudent to stop the | train and put it out, or leave some one to put it out, it would be clearly the duty of the employees on a gravel train, like the one in Rolke v. Railway Co., | following, and discovering the fire already communicated, to take efficient measures to put it out, it being a dry time, and the fire being likely to spread to adjoining property.

The validity of courty and city railroad honds, and the constitutionality of taxation in aid of railroads, has been frequently the subject of judicial consideration within a few years, there being a disposition to contest the soundness of the former well-nigh universal rule that such bonds are valid and such taxation constitutional. See ante, vol. 4, p. 329. The supreme court of Wisconsin, in Whiting v. The Sheboygan and Fond du Lac Railway Co., 3 Am. Rep. 30 (25 Wis. 167), and the supreme court of Michigan, in The People v. The Town of Salem, 4 Am. Rep. 400 (20 Mich. 452), have decided that an act of the legislature authorizing municipal aid to railroads, by taxation, is unconstitutional. It was also understood that such was the position of the supreme court of Iowa, as announced in Hanson v. Vernon, 1 Am. Rep. 215 (27 Iowa, 28), but this case was practically overruled in Stewart v. Supervisors of Polk County, 1 Am. Rep. 238 (30 Iowa, 9), wherein the constitutionality of an act of the legislature authorizing municipal aid, by taxation, to railroads, was distinctly declared. In this latter case Beck, J., delivered an elaborate and able dissenting opinion, in which he took occasion to say: my opinion the decision of the majority of this court in this case will fail to settle the important question involved. It is in the face of eight prior decisions of this court." (The State ex rel. v. The County of Wapello, 13 Iowa, 389; Myers v. County of Johnson, 14 id. 47;

"In

** *

* *

McMillan v. Boyles, id. 107; Rock v. Wallace, id. 593; Smith v. Henry County, 15 id. 385; Ten Eyck v. Mayor of Keokuk, id. 486; Chamberlain v. City of Burlington, 19 id. 395; McClure v. Owen, 26 id. 144; Hanson v. Vernon, 27 id. 28.) "It overrules Hanson v. Vernon, which holds unconstitutional a law, as I have shown, in no respect different from the one in question. It cannot and will not satisfy the legal mind of the country that it is of greater authority than the adjudications it overrules." This is unfortunate for the dignity and weight of the decisions of the supreme court of Iowa, and reminds us very forcibly of the judicial coup de etat in the supreme court of the United States in the celebrated legal tender case. We had hoped that the current of decisions which had set in against the constitutionality of municipal aid for railways would not be retarded or broken, and that the supreme court of Iowa would remain firm in its attachment to principle. There is, however, a great weight of authority in favor of the latest position of the Iowa supreme court. See Sharpless v. The Mayor, etc., 21 Penn. St. 147; Commonwealth v. Perkins, 43 id. 410; People v. Mitchell, 35 N. Y. 551; Clarke v. The City of Rochester, 28 id. 605; Slack v. City of Maysville, 13 B. Mon. 1; Maddox v. Graham, 2 Metc. (Ky.) 56; Nicoll v. Mayor, etc., 9 Humph. (Tenn.) 252; Goddin v. Cramp, 8 Leigh (Va.) 120; City of Bridgeport v. Housatonic R. R. Co., 15 Conn. 475; Society for Savings v. New London, 29 id. 174; Shoemaker v. Goshen, 14 Ohio St. 569; Butler v. Dunham, 27 Ill. 474; Gibbons v. Mobile, 36 Ala. 410; Robinson v. Bidwell, 22 Cal. 379; The City of Aurora v. West, 22 Ind. 88; Augusta Bank v. Augusta, 49 Me. 407; Clarke v. Janesville, 10 id. 130; Caldwell v. Justices of Burke, 4 Jones' Eq. (N. C.) 323; Powers v. The Inf. Ct. Dougherty Co., 23 Ga. 65; St. Jo. & C. R. R. Co. v. Buchanan Co., 39 Mo. 485; Strickland v. Miss. R. R. Co., 27 Miss. 209, 224; Cotton v. Com. of Leon Co., 5 Fla. 610; Police Jury v. Succession of McDonough, 8 La. 341; San Antonio v. Jones, 28 Tex. 19; Gillman v. Sheboygan, 2 Black, 510; Thompson v. Lee County, 3 Wall. 327.

EUROPEAN CORRESPONDENCE.

LONDON, June 14.

Although I proposed not to touch for you as yet awhile the Alabama claims, I cannot well resist the opportunity just offered, of adding to my last week's illustrations of legal ignorance, the most complete example that could be desired or devised. In fact the species of law involved in it, although the highest and thus least known, is yet assumed to be quite familiar to even the newspapers and politicians. The leading speakers were the Law lords and ministers of England, and the occasion was a vote of censure on the cabinet in power for their unskillful conduct of the Washington treaty in general and in particular, to coerce them to declare the Consequential damages to be excluded from the jurisdiction of the Geneva arbitration.

There was thus a concentration of the topmost legal

lore of England, with her utmost intellectual eminence and national interest in the question, so that the result must be crucial as a sample and an instruction. For I propose it but in illustration of the ignorance of Law in England, and by consequence in any country which should look to England as an authority, I would not for the present offer any systematic judgment upon either the Alabama claims or Washington treaty, as they must, I think, be still very far from a serious settlement, if I know any thing of the great instincts and destinies of our republic.

This motion of Barl Russell has too been pending for several weeks back; suspended doubtless, in terrorem, to scare the Yankees into moderation, but also giving time for cramming to the pundits who would take part in it. The bolt then was at last hurled by this micromegas of British statesmanship, who made as narrow an escape from dwarfish stature in mind as in body. He opened with the thesis that this England of his is the equal of any country on the face of the earth. And equal she may be, no doubt, in superficial area, in length of money bags, in depth of appetite, both animal and acquisitive. But the speaker's own second position was, that in intellect, in law, and the art of using both, she is no match for the Americans.

This strange phenomenon he then accounts for by a sage remark of Edmund Burke-who is a sort of Solomon in Parliamentary tradition-to the effect that the educated men of America' are in diplomacy full of subtlety. The power of calling up new views of things, through what his lordship thinks the necromancy called "the science of the law," the notion of your jural eminence is universal in this country, and proves to me that its Bar and Law can be reformed but through the Americans. However, the pair of premises which I have thus recited fairly out, line the cohesion of his lordship's speech, which was downright drivelling; nor were the other lay lords, I dare say, better, for I did not read them, and so I hasten to the two Law lords, who talked with some degree of intelligence. They were Westbury and Cairns, a Welshman and an Irishman, both of them well-pensioned exchancellors of England.

Of the former, however, but one or two points seem worth notice, as his strictures took a bias in exculpation of the assailed ministry. In one he said that the Washington treaty might in point of composition have been surpassed by "three charity boys of ten years old," but this though vulgar when spoken of, the literary execution was no exaggeration if applied to what escaped his lordship, to wit, the jural conception and logical construction. The other point alluded to was less unworthy of a lawyer. It urged that the Supplemental article of the treaty in precluding the obnoxious damages between the countries for the future, would not at all cancel the claim for the past or actual, but on the contrary, confirm it, as all negation implies affirmation; and that even this negative pregnant,' though acute enough professionally, did not sound the matter to the bottom, will become evident before I close.

those famous three Rules of Neutrality, with which the Anglo Saxon race were to endow the law of Nations to import nothing more than the insane formula of "due diligence." He vouches for it to their lordships by the, great archbishop as follows: "There is nothing so valueless in argument as the use of a sentence in which you define one expression by its equivalent." I do not know if this be taken with due fidelity from the prelate, with whose book I never refreshed the acquaintance of my boyhood; but I hope the ex-lord chancellor has cited rather from memory than gone to coy or cram from him upon this grave occasion.

Be that, however, as it may, the proper use of a sentence' has not at all to do with argument,' but simply with expression. Nor do we define in a sentence, but rather by it and in part, for there must be more than one of them to circumscribe the subject. Moreover, to transform an expression into its equivalent, so far from being valueless, is definition itself. The conversion of the name with the definition is a school boy truism. I beg your reader's pardon for this school boy commentation, but I am playing the pedagogue to the Senate of the British empire. What the learned lord intended was not at all a definition, but an identical proposition, as shown by his own example. A neutral, says he, is obliged to use due diligence, because it is obligatory on him, or is due by him. This is obviously no effort to define, or even to express, but simply to argue or authenticate, which is quite different. But those logical distinctions, it is plain, were Greek to the learned lord, though doubtless meant as a parade of his specialité in the House.

Still more curious than his Law and Logic was the party inadvertence that he was thus assailing, not the English government but the American. The Rules he stigmatized as futile were the vaunted "concessions" wrung from England by America in the interest of the Law of Nations, so to show them to be worthless, was to praise, not censure, the Gladstone government. And so the House, through its selfish instincts, received the exposure with a tacit chuckling. Descending, however, from your learned formulas to legal facts, his lordship well enough expounded the breadth of difference between the countries in their interpretation of the phrase of 'due diligence.' The Americans, he said, conceive it as commensurate with the emergency and with the magnitude of the results of negligence." The English take it for "the kind of diligence which a neutral government can bestow consistently with its own municipal laws and constitution." And this latter was hear hear-ed by the sympathetic House, as claiming for the law of England to override the Law of Nations.

The speaker also flouted, properly, the original notion of submitting these silly Rules for the acceptance of foreign governments. "I should like," he exclaimed, "to see the face of the foreign government to whom you presented them for adoption." But his reasons, much as usual, are neither law nor logic. He supposes the foreign government merely to object: "I do not understand the English language; you both, at least, speak it. So, when you have agreed between yourselves, you may then come to me and I will consider it." As if Treaties were to be deemed a matter of languages merely, and not mainly of principle, law and logic, which pervade all languages.

set, and which had, after him, been decanted by the heads of his party, including Disraeli himself, at the opening of the present session. They were, it was cried contemptuously, retroactive or ex post facto. Yet, not a word have we heard for weeks back, in those debates, of this fatal formula. And you will pardon if I guess the reason of the strange disappearance. Some time last March your Correspondent made a summary exposure of the blunders of the Washington treaty, in the Anglo-American Times. Among the topics was this ex post facto, of which he noted to the grand new chancellor, that so far from being an absolute objection to Law in general, it forms the special eminence of that description of it he dispensed in office, and which deals out Equity but to a party who does it first, and thereby ex post facto. This retort must have jogged the ex-chancellor with the vis a tergo in every sense. And accordingly neither he, nor I think his following, have since touched the formula.

He did not profit equally by my hints on Arbitration. Here is his idea of it: "I believe that if you refer any breach of duty to the decision of a tribunal, that tribunal, unless you tie up its hands, will have the right to say what are the extent and amount of damages done." Unless you tie up its hands! And so the parties to the cause may, either severally or jointly, tie up the hands, or more properly the tongue of the judge, and deprive him of the right and duty of pronouncing justly in the case. It is the parties who may guide the arbitrator or the judge-not as at Rome, the Prætor! Good, heavens, what a notion for a judge of judges, an English Prætor! How should the parties have the right to present more or less to a tribunal than the subjectmatter in dispute, and the rival forms of the claims to it? That is, in logical language, the genus and the difference; while the judge has to pronounce, by the guidance of their conflict, on an object different from both of them, I mean the species or essence. This besides is what the judge owes to the parties and the public, and therefore neither could deprive him of the proper means of reaching it. Qui vent le but, vent les moyens. Yet this 'great lawyer' says further: "Such is the nature of a difference between two nations, that no one can decide the point between them." What he would no doubt say was, that there is no constituted judge; but this mere accident of history he makes a crotchet of absolute nature. But are there likewise no principles, or laws of justice and of reason? And is it not to measure and to minister those supreme laws, that the parties are allowed to constitute tribunals of arbitration on the presumption that this personal concert of their opposite interests must tend toward justice even as the species must lie between the difference and genus.

Our Law lord comes at last to the 'consideration,' as he formally announced it, of the Indirect damages, and he was the sole speaker in the whole debate who even proposed it. I might say the sole person, whether speaker, writer or diplomat, throughout this vast transaction, and, I think, in both the countries, who has not studiously evaded all explanation of these mystic damages. Professor Bernard seems the sole exception, in his late lecture at Oxford; and how he fared in the attempt I will exhibit at another time. Returning, therefore, to Lord Cairns, how was it he 'considered' them? By saying that he himself "believed them to be absolutely preposterous;" that the English never meant to ratify them in the Treaty; and that no judge would listen to any claims of the kind. But of what

this kind may be, or its jural reasons, he breathes no syllable! If worth an answer, he might be asked, does his 'belief' prove them preposterous? or the refusal of the English, conclude them to be illegitimate? Or even the exclusion by a Civil judge, apply to International arbitrators? And all this the more especially in one who urged, as we observed, that the Geneva tribunal has, on the contrary, the right to act upon them! The right to award claims that are 'absolutely preposterous', and which no judge or arbitrator would at all entertain! But no one thinks of reasoning or giving reasons in the British Parliament. Its debates are a mere medley of beliefs, opinions or other crotchets, strung together but by the doctrines, from day to day of the morning papers,' and supported by the money or the muscle of the men who utter them.

Descending again to particulars, where his lordship was more at home, he asks why, after offering to pay the losses of private Americans they should be called on for the government expenses in pursuing cruisers? Why, for the reason that the government was bound to protect its citizens, and had, in striving to discharge this duty, been put, through England, to those expenses. Moreover, the offer to pay private sufferers these Direct damages, or deal with them at all, was an impertinence in England, and on the other hand an uncouth blunder in your early American negotiations. For good or ill they could be reached by a foreign government but through their own, as its national co-equal, and thereby indirectly. What would this personage say if told, that to damage at all a government by other ways than Indirect and Consequential ones, is even impossible, and therefore that the flouted damages are alone proper in the case?

With this effort of Lord Cairns, the debate closed for the night and by adjournment of a day's interval to mark the effect on the Yankees. And sure enough, the resumption of the piece was opened scenically with a letter from your minister, countersigned by Mr. Fish, and which was handed exultingly to Earl Russell who controlled the motion. The scene that followed in the House, was utterly grotesque. It forthwith again adjourned, but now with the hilarity of an Irish hedge-school that has got a holiday. The chuckling murmur ran about that the Americans had 'caved in.' The House of lords was, after all, not yet defunct, but could send a scare across the Atlantic. The Consequential damages were both abandoned in the case and had disappeared for ever from the law of nations, or it was "the immunity of neutrals from liability for indirect damages in the future," as the Times next day de-* scribed it with newspaper dignity.

But what was really the American note that gave ocasion to these rejoicings? The General merely stated with the pragmatism of an attorney, that "those indirect claims put forth in the case at Geneva," and he says, after "those same claims" would be foregone by his government, or rather exchanged for the "consideration" of England's acceding to the Supplemental article. Thus so far from being abandoned as 'preposterous' or disingenuous, the damages in question would, by England herself, be received as the consideration. that is, cause or substance of the whole Treaty; and be moreover so accepted in the particular case and quantum, and not all on principle, nor for the future, save between these parties. Did the sudden relief from terror ever before breed such hallucinations? "Heaven help the country that is served by such negotiators," was a bitter exclamation of Lord Cairns toward the

Ministry. And I say, Heaven help the country that has such Law lords and statesmen; for if England has been tolerably well helped hitherto in history, it must, I fear, be from a region accounted opposite to Heaven.

M. Fish then, whatever newspaper ignorance may splutter, seems to me to have here and hitherto, behaved with firmness and intelligence; we need not thus far be ashamed of him as a fellow New Yorker; a down-east secretary, or up-south one would be long since wheedled into a settlement. No doubt the country is discredited by at all sharing in such a traversity. But the American part is seen to be that of a well-fed cat, which sets demurely to divert itself by baffling a huge water-rat, that, caught aloof from its habitual and hiding element of darkness, runs to and fro bewildered and blind with mud, to find escape. Some months ago I wrote to a personal friend of the President, that Irishmen of head and who are hostile to England, do not desire that America should go to war with this country; they only need to have her exposed as above upon the stage of Nations. This will have the combined effects of destroying her foreign prestige, dispelling from the serfish Irish their lurking awe of her capacity, and abating in her own people that stolid but empty arrogance which leads to most of her misdeeds, and is a bar to her real civilitude. Already the national credit for all Legal knowledge must be gone for ever. J. O'CONNELL.

DIGEST OF RECENT AMERICAN DECISIONS. SUPREME COURT OF NEW YORK. *

ADVANCEMENTS.

1. In no case can a child, born after the making of a will by his father, recover of any brother or sister, born before the will was made, any portion of any advancement, made by his father in his life-time, to such brother or sister. Sanford v. Sanford et al.

2. When a parent conveys land to his child, without asking or receiving any consideration therefor, the presumption is that it is an advancement to the child, though the deed recites a money consideration, and contains au acknowledgment of the payment of it. Ib.

3. Small, inconsiderable sums of money, occasionally given to a child to spend, or to defray expenses in traveling, or to pay for small presents, and the like, should be deemed to have been given "without a view to a portion or settlement in life," as contemplated by the statute, and are not to be regarded as advancements. Ib.

4. But a considerable sum of money, given to a son to enable him to start in business, is prima facie, an advancement. Ib.

5. And every considerable sum of money, given to a child to use in business, should be deemed an advancement, unless proved to have been given without a view to a portion or settlement in life. Ib.

ASSESSORS AND ASSESSMENT.

1. Property of a corporation.-Where assessors assessed the real estate of a corporation at $125,000, and on application refused to correct the assessment, although the highest valuation fixed for such real estate, by the uncontradicted evidence before them, was but $45,000, held, that they should have corrected the assessment, by striking out the sum of $125,000, as the valuation

* From Hon. O. L. Barbour, and to appear in vol. 61 Barbour's Reports.

of the real estate, and inserting the sum of $45,000 in its place. The People ex rel. The American Linen Thread Company v. Howland et al.

2. Held also, that, after having deducted from the amount of capital paid in or secured, such sum of $45,000, for the value of the real estate, it was proper for the assessors to assess the remaining capital as, personal estate, at its actual value, as shown by the evidence before them. Ib.

3. Assessors act in a judicial capacity, in hearing parties aggrieved, and must be governed by the evidence presented to them on an application to correct the assessment. Ib.

4. Where, upon an application to correct an assessment, there is no evidence before the assessors, on the subject of the value of the real estate assessed, except the affidavits produced by the owner, they, if uncontroverted, must be considered controlling and conclusive. Ib.

ATTACHMENT.

1. Plaintiff's rights to. -Although an attachment is an extraordinary remedy not known to the common law, and therefore one which courts should watch with scrupulous jealousy, yet when a creditor fairly brings himself, by his application, within the spirit and intent of the statute authorizing the remedy, he is to be protected in the enjoyment of its advantages. Rowles et al v. Hoare.

The

2. Motion to discharge: when it may be made. provision in section 241 of the Code, as amended in 1857, that "in all cases the defendant may move to discharge the attachment, as in the case of other provisional remedies," includes all cases, such as want of jurisdiction in the officer who issued the attachment; fraud in obtaining it; defective papers; and various others." Ib. 3. An application to discharge or vacate an attachment may now be made in furtherance of justice, upon the real merits of the motion as for irregularity, or for want of jurisdiction in the officer who granted it, or from other cause. And such motion may be made after judgment entered in the action; even though the defendant has appeared and given the undertaking required by sections 240, 241. Ib.

4. Affidavits upon motion.-In cases where the defendant moves upon his own affidavit, or affidavits made on his behalf, the plaintiff may oppose the motion, as in other cases, by affidavits which either explain or contradict those offered by the moving party. Ib.

5. Where the motion is made upon the plaintiff's original affidavits alone, no further affidavits on the part of the plaintiff are admissible. Ib.

6. When the defendant moves not only upon the original affidavits used in obtaining the attachment, but also upon his own and other affidavits, in order to show the improvidence of issuing it, as well as to show the injustice of issuing it, on account of the unfair statements in the plaintiff's affidavits, and asks to have it vacated and set aside; to be restored to his rights by reason of the action under it; to set aside the judgment and to be permitted to come in and defend the action upon the merits, the plaintiff has a right to read affidavits in opposition to each point in his proceedings which is assailed by the defendant in his moving papers, and as to which he asks for relief. lb.

CRIMINAL LAW.

1. Murder: trial: conviction.-Upon an indictment for murder, the jury under the statute (2 R. S., Edm. ed 725, § 27), may convict the prisoner of any degree of