No more important portion of the law of India has yet been codified than that embodied in the Transfer of Property Act. The object of this Act, as stated by its framers, was, firstly, to bring the rules which regulate the transmission of property between living persons into harmony with the rules affecting its devolution upon death, and thus to furnish the complement of the work commenced in framing the law of intestate and testamentary succession; and, secondly, to complete the code of contract law, so far as relates to immovable property. The Act deals with sales, mortgages, leases, exchanges, and gifts of immovable property, and with the transfer of actionable claims. In a country where fraud abounds to such an extent that English judges in India have had their judicial vision so far impaired as to become, in the language of their Lordships of the Privy Council, apt to see fraud everywhere-the habit being superinduced by the manifold cases of fraud with which they have to deal-no fraud has been more common than secret and underhand dealing with land. Under the benami system of the country secret and fraudulent conveyances were used to cheat creditors, to deceive purchasers. Honesty and morality were destroyed by fraudulent dealing; and progress and prosperity were retarded in consequence of the insecurity of title to real property. In 1864 a partial remedy for this state of things was attempted by the passing of a Registration Act. This Act rendered compulsory the registration of all documents dealing with immovable property of the value of one hundred rupees (about £7) or more, the penalty for non-registration being that no Court could give effect to the unregistered document. In the case of documents dealing with property of less value registration was left optional, but was encouraged by making a registered document prevail over an unregistered document relating to the same property—a provision intended to prevent fraud, which the astute Asiatic promptly utilized for the perpetration of fraud by selling or mortgaging his property once by an unregistered document and a second time by a registered document. This law, however, only provided for the

In

1 The Indian Registration Acts provide merely for the registration of assurances, not for the registration of title. The essential benefit of this system of registration is to supply proof that a document was in existence at a certain point of time and was not therefore fabricated afterwards-a piece of evidence by no means unimportant in India. As a record of past dealings with real property to assist the investigation of title, the registers have been little used (except perhaps in the Presidency-towns), for the obvious reason that they supplied no information as to unwritten transactions, which before the passing of the Transfer of Property Act were possible, legal, and common. During the year 1885-6 the Registration Department in India yielded a net surplus to the State of Rs. 1,215,930 (about £91,194), a profit upon supplying the Courts with the above species of proof. A Register of Title as complete as that to be found in Australia, or in any country of the continent of Europe, was possible in India. The land pays revenue to Government as a rule; and there are in the public offices of Government complete registers of all estates (1) paying revenue, and (2) exempted from paying revenue. the offices of the estate-owners, who are proprietors subject to the payment of this revenue, there are similar registers of subordinate estates and holdings paying rent. All transfers are entered therein with scrupulous accuracy. Nothing would have been easier than to utilize these registers for the purpose of registration of title, and this course was strongly pressed upon the Government by the present reviewer, but other counsels prevailed. The utility of the course so advocated and its acceptableness to the native community (a consideration too often not sufficiently regarded in legislating for India) are shown by what has since taken place in the Madras Presidency, as told in the following extract from the Statement exhibiting the Moral and Material Progress and Condition of India during the year 1885-6:—' A great convenience has been effected by allowing parties registering documents relating to landed property to apply to the registration officer to have the transfer of the land noted at the same time in the registry which is kept for revenue purposes.' And the profit to the State has been materially increased in this Presidency by meeting in this way the wants of the native community.

registration of the written instrument, when the parties had committed the transaction to writing, and such an instrument was therefore in existence. But writing was not then made, nor had it previously been, necessary for any transaction affecting real property in India. In 1882 for the first time the Transfer of Property Act-which may therefore be termed the Indian Statute of Frauds-made writing necessary for sales, mortgages, and exchanges of immovable property of the value of one hundred rupees or upwards; and such writing must be registered. Where the property is of less value than one hundred rupees, there must be a registered writing, or delivery of the property. A registered instrument is also made necessary for leases from year to year, or for any term exceeding one year or reserving a yearly rent and a gift-that oft-used weapon of benami fraud-can be made effectual as to immovable property only by a registered instrument attested by at least two witnesses. If we were reviewing the work of the Indian legislature instead of that of Messrs. Shephard and Brown we would say that these provisions are wise and excellent. As to the work of the commentators, we have to observe that sufficient point is not given, for the benefit of the student, to these changes, regard being had to the former state of the law and its baneful influences upon litigation.

The law of real property in England is an intricate and difficult subject for a student to master, even with the help of the excellent text-books which are available to assist his studies. The law of real property in India is quite as intricate and difficult, and the same excellent assistance is not available. It is mixed up with, and to be extracted from, the revenue systems which vary in each Presidency and within the same Presidency; and these systems can be mastered only by wading through much irrelevant matter, past and present. Any book therefore which would, at once exhaustively and satisfactorily, deal with the Transfer of Real Property in India, must be the work of long labours varied in each Presidency (there is no High Court for the whole of India, each Presidency has its own) and matured by study and experience. Messrs. Shephard and Brown, whose practice and experience extend to the Madras Presidency only, could scarcely have been expected to produce such a work. Their concrete cases are, as might have been expected, drawn rather from English reports than from Indian cases. Nevertheless, there is a great deal of very useful matter in their Commentaries, and no student of the Transfer of Property Act will rise from their perusal without having clearer ideas of the object and scope of the Act. Where the commentators attempt to anticipate the operation of the Act upon future cases they are not always quite successful; and in our view this fore-judgment of possible cases, unoccurred and unargued, might well be omitted in such a commentary, which would better explain the text of the law from the standpoint of what has been done in the past.

We may notice an obvious error at page 137, where it is laid down that, if a money decree merely is taken for a mortgage debt, the mortgagee is under the Act precluded from executing it by attachment of the mortgaged property-reference being made to section 99. Now section 99 does not preclude from executing such a decree by attachment of the mortgaged property it precludes merely from bringing such property to sale otherwise than by instituting a suit under section 67. This is the only positive error which we have noticed in the book, and it will doubtless be rectified in a future edition. Apart from these criticisms, the work is creditable to the industry and learning of its authors, and is a useful addition to the Indian Law Library.

C. D. F.

Französisches und Englisches Handelsrecht im Anschluss an das Allgemeine Deutsche Handelsgesetzbuch. Von W. SPÄING, Amtsrichter in Berlin. Berlin: Franz Vahlen. 1888. 8vo. viii and 538 pp. THIS book is intended to give a survey of French and English mercantile law to German readers. The method adopted is that of starting from the text of the German Mercantile Code, and of adding a statement of the foreign law after each section-the part relating to maritime law being omitted. We do not think that this is a good plan; no two systems of law can be properly worked into the same scheme, and a system of such irregular growth as our own is least fitted to be forced into an artificial symmetry of this nature. Moreover, the German Code is by no means an exhaustive statement of the law on the subjects with which it deals; it is a system of rules which, in the cases in which it is applied, either overrides or complements the ordinary law, and nobody can understand it to whom that ordinary law is unknown. If the English law is arranged according to the same scheme, the reader who starts without any previous information must be necessarily left in the dark as to many important and fundamental principles. Another difficulty arises from the fact that the juxtaposition of a codified and an uncodified system necessitates a precision of form in the exposition of the latter, which, unless supported by ample authority, is unnatural and delusive.

If we except this fault of arrangement, we may say that Mr. Späing has succeeded fairly well. He gives a good deal of matter, and has, on the whole, been discriminating in the selection of the text-books from which he derives his knowledge; some of the statutes are translated in extenso, and the translations are done with care and judgment. If we have to dwell on the faults of the book, it is not because we fail to recognise its merits, but because we think that it might be remodelled, so as to become a valuable help to a large class of readers.

We have said that no two systems of law can be properly worked into the same scheme. One of the chief reasons for this is due to the circumstance, that, owing to historical and local causes, some parts of every system require much more elaboration than the corresponding parts of another body of law. In Germany, for instance, it is of great importance to know whether a given set of facts is governed by the mercantile or by the general law. Hence the necessity for a strict definition of the characteristics of traders and of trading transactions. There is a string of rules on that subject in the German Code, and as something had to be said about England, Mr. Späing has been at some pains to find corresponding ones in English text-books, or to deduce them by analogy or otherwise. The result is misleading, because the rules thus given are vague and pointless; but more so, because the reader necessarily thinks that they must have some practical application, which, as regards a great many of them, is not the case. Again, a large proportion of the provisions of the German Code is put in for the purpose of modifying the ordinary law in the cases to which the Code applies. Here also the parallel rules of English law are given, and the reader has to find out for himself whether they also are exceptions from the ordinary law, or whether they are general statements of the whole law. While thus, on the one hand, places which in reality are vacant in our system are filled up with a view to symmetry of arrangement, we find, on the other hand, that doctrines, which are of the highest importance in English law, are left out, either because in Germany they belong to the general law, which a reader of the mercantile code is supposed to know, or because

the German law has no room for them. We have looked in vain for the distinction between simple contracts and contracts under seal, for the doctrine of consideration and other material parts of the English law of contracts; the difference between executed and executory sales is not explained; the law of agency is dealt with in connection with a very narrow branch of it in the German law; the important class of trading corporations, which are not registered under the Companies Act, is left out in the enumeration of mercantile associations; and other similar omissions occur.

These are faults of arrangement which are almost inevitable consequences of the method adopted; but the book is not free from mistakes, which a careful writer like Mr. Späing might have avoided. What is said on page 7 about the contracts of infants is by no means correct, and it is also inaccurate to say that an infant cannot be a trader. The whole subject of the capacity of married woman (pp. 8-13) is not properly understood; the statement on page 10, in the City of London, a married woman may be a trader with the consent of her husband,' would be just as correct if the words printed in italics had been left out. In saying on page 35 that in English law there are no provisions enjoining a trader to keep books, the author overlooks § 28 (3) of the Bankruptcy Act. It is not correct to say that partnership property cannot be taken in execution for the purpose of enforcing a judgment against a partner (p. 107); nor is there any justification for the statement, that the notice to discontinue a partnership of undetermined duration must not be given at an inappropriate time (zur Unzeit, p. 112). What is said on page 401 about contracts for the sale of goods of a lower price than £10, implies that, apart from the exceptions there stated, these contracts must be in writing, which is of course quite wrong. It is also incorrect to say that a 'Spediteur' (forwarding agent) is considered a common carrier (p. 477). It is not true in fact that in deeds of transfer relating to shares in registered companies the buyer's name is usually left in blank (p. 297); and if a buyer, for the sake of avoiding the stamp duty on a re-sale, has a transfer made out in this form, he incurs considerable risk. The definition of negotiable instruments as ' documents relating to a sum of money payable to order or bearer' (p. 368) entirely misses the essential point.

We do not wish to lay too much stress on these and other errors which occur in the book, because there is a good deal of solid work by the side of them. A book of this sort was much wanted in Germany, and the author may, therefore, look forward to bringing out a second edition. In that case we should suggest that the statement of the foreign law should not follow the sections of the Code, but that a systematic exposition of the whole law on each subject should be given at the end of the division relating to it, and we should further suggest a careful revision of the matter itself. If this be done, Mr. Späing will produce a very useful book. E. S.

Outlines of International Law, with an account of its origin and sources and of its historical development. By GEORGE B. DAVIS, U.S.A., Assistant Professor of Law at the U.S. Military Academy. London Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington. 1888. 8vo. xxiv and 469 pp.

It is a pious opinion that no sermon is preached which someone may not be the better for hearing; and it may be plausibly maintained that a new book, however slightly it may differ from its predecessors on the same subject, is probably, in some respect or other, an improvement upon them. On reading Mr. Davis's early chapters, we were disposed to think that only

on some such principle could the appearance of his book be justified. The writing struck us as that of an industrious amateur, with access to a fairly good library. These chapters are indeed a cento of truisms culled from respectable authorities, varied by alarming lapses into errors more or less original. What is one to think of a writer who informs us that Private International Law is that branch of the science which has to do with the relations of States to the citizens or subjects of other States'; who implies that the rights of neutrals are discussed in several of the early maritime codes; who thinks that certain treaty provisions warrant the inference that a period of residence is a necessary preliminary to a change of national allegiance'; who alludes to Roman law as 'the most complete and elaborate code of law that has ever existed'; who says that the Baltic ' is acknowledged to be a closed sea'; whose information as to the navigation of the Danube ends with the year 1871; who represents the Declaration of Paris as restraining the States who were parties to it from capturing private property at sea, except enemy goods in enemy ships and contraband of war'; who attributes to Abbot' Mr. Lawrence's Essays on Modern International Law; who speaks of Sir Montague Bernard' and 'SolicitorGeneral Layard' ?

The fact is that Mr. Davis has not adequately mastered the topics dealt with in the first half of his volume. The latter half is much more satisfactory. The account of war and prize law, though slight, is a good straightforward piece of writing, interspersed here and there with passages of practical importance, e. g. the remarks (p. 225) on the employment of chain-shot, and (p. 344) on the new doctrines asserted during the American Civil War with reference to Contraband and Blockade, Т. Е. Н.

A Treatise on the Law of Stock and Stockholders. By WILLIAM W. COOK. New York: Baker, Voorhis & Co. 1887. La. 8vo. xciv and 787 pp.

THE great development of business corporations in America, and the consequent growth of the law which governs them, has produced quite a crop of text-books in that country. Not only has the number of treatises professing to deal with the whole of the law of private corporations been increased of late years, but particular branches of that law have been made the subject of special study, and have been treated in separate books. Of these the latest is Cook's Law of Stock and Stockholders, which, as its name indicates, attempts to consider all the rights and liabilities of owners of the shares or stock of such corporations. In reading it one cannot fail to be struck by the readiness with which the Common Law conception of a corporation has adapted itself to the wants of the business community and to the demands of the stock exchange. The desire for investments, easily transferable and free from personal liability, has been more easily satisfied by means of the form of a corporation than through the more cumbrous machinery of a joint-stock company; and it is for this reason, perhaps, that certain branches of the law of the stock exchange have been far more fully developed in America where the corporation has flourished, than in England where the modern limited company has been evolved from the partnership. The certificate, for example, which is issued to a shareholder by the company, and is commonly used by him in transferring his shares, has received very little attention in England, while it has given rise to a great deal of litigation on the other side of the water. It is there settled by a long line of decisions that a corporation which registers a transfer of stock without