own statistics. Shakspeare needed not to dog murderers, note-book in hand, in order to give in Macbeth a comprehensive summary of their pitiable estate. It may, indeed, be necessary for physicians to study minutely many special cases of insanity in order to build up by induction the grand generalization of Lear; but he who gave it grasped it entire in an ideal world, and left to less happy natures the task of imitating its august proportions by patient ly piling together a thousand facts. The abolition of slavery must be demanded by the moral instinct of a people before their understanding may be satisfied of its practical fitness and material success. The evidences in favor of emancipation are useful after the same manner as the evidences of Christianity: the man whose heart cannot be stirred by the tender appeal of the Gospel shall not be persuaded by the exegetical charming of the most orthodox expositor.

But now that circumstances have caused loyal American citizens to think upon slavery, and to mark with a quickened moral perception its enormous usurpations, there could be no publication more timely than this volume by M. Cochin. To be sure, all illustration of the results of this legalized injustice, derived from a past experience, must be tame to those who stand face to face with the gigantic conspiracy in which it has concentrated its venom, and from which it must stagger to its doom. The familiar proverb which declares that the gods make mad those whom they would destroy has a significance not always considered. For when a man loses his intellectual equilibrium, a baseness of character which never broke through the crust of conventionality may be suddenly revealed; and when a wicked system goes mad, such depths of perfidy are disclosed as few imagined to exist. During the last two years, while our Southern sky has been aglow with the red light of the slave-masters' insurrection, few of us could probe and pry about among details of lesser villanies than those pertinent to the day. And so it is fortunate that M. Cochin now comes to address a people instinctively grasping at the principle which may give them peace, and to offer them his calm and thorough investigation of the material basis whereon that principle may surely rest.

"L'Abolition de l'Esclavage," of which the first volume is translated under the title at the head of this notice, was published in 1861. It is a diligent study of official and other testimony bearing upon slavery and emancipation. M. Cochin had access to the unpublished records of every ministry in Europe, and gives his evidence with scientific precision. He has faithfully detailed the effects of liberating the slaves in the colonies of France and England, as well as in those of Denmark, Sweden, and Holland. By an admirable clearness of arrangement, and a certain netteté of statement, the reader retains an impression of the experience in slavery and its abolition which each colony represents. That no disturbance should follow emancipation, we apprehend that no one, who believes in the moral government of the world, can seriously expect. Ceasing to persist in sin frees neither man nor nation from the penalty it entails. But the dis tressing consequences of any social upheaval make a far greater impression upon the common mind than the familiar evils of the condition from which the community emerges. The amount of suffering which must temporarily follow an act of justice long delayed is always over-estimated. Many half-measures for the public safety, many blunders easy to be avoided, produce the derangement of affairs which the enemies of human freedom are never tired of proclaiming. It is the merit of M. Cochin to separate that penalty of wrong which it is impossible to extinguish from the disastrous results of causes peculiar to the politics of a given nation, or to the private character of its officers. He certainly shows that production and commerce have not been annihilated by the abolition of slavery, while the moral condition of both races has been manifestly improved. Recognizing the immutable laws which are potent in the life of nations, M. Cochin touches upon the remote antecedents of slavery as well as the immediate antecedents of emancipation. His results are divided into groups, material, economical, and moral; thus the reader may easily systematize the information of the book. There are practical lessons in relation to the great deed to which our nation has been called that may well be laid to heart. The insurrection of San Domingo preceded emancipation,

and was due to the absurd law of the Constituent Assembly which gave the same privileges to freemen of every color and every degree of education and capacity. While we recognize the negro as a man, let us remember that the time for recognizing him as a citizen is not yet. We must also mark the importance of paying with promptness the indemnity to the master, in order that the greater part of it may pass in the form of wages into the hands of the servant. Forewarned of mistakes in the methods of emancipation, which other nations deplore, we encounter the question with many important aids to its solution.

M. Cochin, though not a Protestant like Count de Gasparin, writes in a similar spirit of fervent Christian belief. In the second volume of his work, which we trust will soon appear in America, the relation of Christianity to slavery is powerfully discussed. The Catholic Church is shown to oppose this crime against humanity, and the Pope, as if to indorse the conclusion, has conferred an order of knighthood upon the author since the publication of his book. It is worth while to note that the most logical and effective assailants of slavery that these last years have produced have been devout Catholics,-Augustin Cochin in France, and Orestes A. Brownson in America. And while we think that it will require a goodly amount of special pleading to clear either the Catholic Church or most Protestant sects from former complicity with this iniquity, we heartily rejoice that those liberal men who intelligently encourage and direct the noblest instinct of the time are the exclusive possession of no form of religious belief. From every ritual of worship, from every variety of speculative creed, earnest minds have reached the same practical ground of labor for the freedom of man. Such minds realize that Christianity can approximate its exact application only as the machinery of human society is rightly comprehended. The Gospel, acting through the church, the meeting-house, the lecture-room, and the press, is demanding the redemption of master and slave from the mutual curse of their relation. Every affliction and struggle of this civil war may be sanctified, not only to the moral improvement, but also to the material prosperity of our land.

Great events are required to inspire a people with great ideas. Sicut patribus sit Deus nobis is the motto of the city whence the "Atlantic" goes forth to its readers. Let all who adopt this aspiration remember for what they ask. God was with our fathers, and sent them hardship, peril, defeat, that, battling painfully therewith, they might become great and fruitful men. Not otherwise can He be with us. From the misery of our civil strife we may educe a future happiness, as well as a present blessedness. The fierce excitement of physical action has been contagious to the heart and intellect of the time. Realities have presented themselves which can be met only by ideas. In the seeming distant years of our old prosperity, a few men and women sought to abolish slavery because it oppressed the inferior race; today, the nation deals with it because it has rendered the superior race hopelessly violent and corrupt. Of course, there will always be a class of doubting Thomases ready to deny the presence of any divine leadership that may not at once be touched and weighed and measured. To the prototype of these men such tangible evidence as his feeble faith could accept was not withheld. And those among us who are in like condition may read M. Cochin's book, and be convinced that a system which to the common sense of the Christian world seems morally wrong is neither politically expedient nor materially

necessary.

A Treatise on the Law of Promissory Notes and Bills of Exchange. By THEOPHILUS PARSONS, LL. D., Dane Professor of Law in Harvard University, and Author of Treatises on the Law of Contracts, on the Elements of Mercantile Law, on Maritime Law, and the Laws of Business for Business-Men. In Two Volumes. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.

We eat and drink paper and live upon paper, is a metaphor which has been true enough these many years, but we probably appreciate the liveliness of it just at the present time more thoroughly than ever before. But even now we realize very imperfectly what a power in the world paper-money is; for we are apt to

think of it only as a circulating medium in the form of bank-notes, or treasurynotes, or of somebody's currency which has the merit of making no pretensions to the theoretical idea of a currency which represents gold, the representative of everything else. Bills of exchange and promissory notes are instruments quite as indispensable to modern commerce and civilization; and when the necessities of an enlarged commercial intercourse, some five or six hundred years ago, first led to the use of paper as a representative of money, it was in the form of bills of exchange. All the absolute requirements of social life and of commerce among the ancient Greeks and Romans were satisfied by the use of the precious metals as money, though the want of new facilities and new instruments of commercial exchange must have been constantly experienced. Cicero, writing to his friend Atticus, when he was about to send his son to Athens, inquires whether he can have credit upon Athens for what money his son may have occasion for, or whether the young man must carry it with him in specie. Cicero desired to accomplish what is now effected by a negotiable bill of exchange; and if such instruments had been in use, he would have gone to the forum and purchased a bill on Athens for the requisite amount. But as it was, though he may possibly have found some one at Rome who had money owing to him by some one at Athens, and may have arranged with this Roman creditor that this debt should be paid to his son at Athens by the debtor there, it is quite certain that no instrument answering to our negotiable bill of exchange was used in the transaction.

Though the discovery or invention of bills of exchange cannot be ascribed with certainty to any precise period, they are for the first time unmistakably referred to in laws of the commercial nations of Southern Europe in the latter part of the thirteenth century, and they probably came into frequent use soon after that time. Perhaps the earliest bill of exchange of which we have an authentic copy is one made at the beginning of the fifteenth century, and which approaches pretty nearly to the form now in use. A translation of the instrument from the Italian, in which it was written, is as follows:

"Francisco de Prato and Company at Barcelona. In the name of God, Amen. The 28th day of April, 1404. Pay by this first of exchange at usance to Pietro Gilberto and Pietro Olivo one thousand scuti at ten shillings Barcelona money per scuto, which thousand scuti are in exchange with Giovanni Colombo at twenty-two grosses per scuto, and place to our account; and Christ keep you.

"ANTONIO QUArti sab. di Brugis."

For this curious relic of commercial history we are indebted to the fact that the mercantile company upon which the bill was drawn failed to pay it, whereupon the parties fell into a dispute about the matter of damages, and the magistrates of Bruges wrote to those of Barcelona, setting forth this bill with the facts of the case, and requesting information upon the usage respecting bills of exchange in their city.

A bill drawn in England about the year 1500 bears less resemblance to the form now used, and instead of commencing and ending with the devout expressions of the Italian bill, it has the formal words, "Be it known to all Me yt I," etc., and "hereto I bynde me myn executours and all my Goodis, wheresoever they may be founde, in Wytnesse whereof I have written and sealyed this Byll, the X Day of," etc. It was made payable to a person named, "or to the Bringer of this Byll."

Bills of exchange were first used only for the benefit of a specified payee, but it was not long before the element of negotiability was added to foreign bills, which, thus perfected, became at once the indispensable instruments of commerce which they now are. The negotiability of inland bills and of promissory notes was not recognized till long afterwards. In England, inland bills were not used in any form till about the middle of the seventeenth century; and Lord Holt, in a case reported half a century later, said he remembered the time when actions upon inland bills first began. Indeed, the earliest case in which foreign bills of exchange are mentioned in the English Reports is as late as the first year of the reign of James I., though they appear to have been known to the courts in the preceding reign of Elizabeth, for there are extant precedents of declarations upon them of that period. The earliest reported case of an inland bill occurs in 1663. It ap

pears that the negotiability of promissory notes was a matter of doubt with the Court of Queen's Bench as late as 1702. The court seem to have felt very little confidence in their own opinion upon the question; for Chief Justice Holt, after urging his opinion against the negotiability of such instruments, took occasion to speak with two or three of the most famous merchants in London, as to the consequences it was alleged would follow from obstructing their negotiability; and on another day he says that they had told him it was very frequent with them to make such notes, and that they looked upon them as bills of exchange, and that they had been used a matter of thirty years, and were frequently transferred and indorsed as bills of exchange. In 1704 Parliament put an end to the dispute between Lord Holt and the merchants by recǝgnizing the negotiable qualities of promissory notes which now belong to them.

The law of promissory notes and bills of exchange is thus seen to be of very recent origin. In the early part of the seventeenth century there was a single reported case in the English language in this department of legal learning; now these volumes of Professor Parsons present us an array of more than ten thousand cases decided in the highest courts of England and America, and a great majority of these are cases that have occurred within the present century, if not within the last quarter of a century. Though the subject is apparently a simple one, it has presented a multitude of questions for the consideration of the courts, many of which it has taxed their highest wisdom to rightly solve.

A new book in any department of the law has one merit, if it is worth anything at all, and that is, the merit of presenting the latest conclusions of the courts upon the topics treated of. In the department of the law treated of by the work now under notice, this merit is one of special consideration, for it has hardly reached its full development, and some of its important rules are hardly settled. In this treatise Professor Parsons has taken much pains to present the law just as judicial determinations and legislative enactments have left it up to the period of publication. But this work has merits which will last after its newness is gone. It is compre

hensive in its plan, embracing the discussion of many points in the law of negotiable paper which are not referred to in other treatises upon the subject. In style, the text of the work is written with a clearness and grace which often give it all the pleasantness of a finished essay, if one chooses to read on without allowing his attention to be called off by the frequent references to the notes. The notes occupy much space, and give very full discussions of the more important points, with quotations from the most important decisions. They are printed in a smaller type, and the author is thereby enabled to give much more matter in his work than he otherwise could. A logical arrangement of the subject-matter in chapters which are subdivided into numerous sections, each treating of a separate topic, which is tersely expressed in a heading to it, makes it very easy for one to find the statement or discussion of any point which he desires to investigate. This admirable mode of arrangement and division of the subject is a characteristic of all the legal treatises of Professor Parsons, and our own experience is that it is much easier to find what we want in his works than in any others that we have had occasion to use or refer to. The usefulness of a law-book depends also very much upon its index; and the completeness and accuracy of this part of the work are noticeable in this as well as in the other treatises of the author.

In our examination of the work we had marked several chapters, with the intention of making special reference to them: the first chapters of the work, for the precision and clearness with which the essential elements of bills and notes are defined and explained; the chapter on Checks, for presenting the most complete statement which we have of the law upon that important topic; the chapters upon Action and Evidence, for giving in a systematic form much matter which is of the greatest use to the practitioner, but which the textbooks have generally left him to pick up as best he may, or have presented in a brief and unsatisfactory manner; and other chapters for still other features of excellence. But we have not space for further comment. These volumes are the result of a truly vast amount of labor, and we are confident that they will be received by the profession, by students, and by

business-men with a hearty gratitude to the author for the service he has done them in writing this new work.

There is a short Appendix, containing a reprint of the provisions of the Stamp Act of the United States in relation to

bills, notes, letters of credit, drafts, orders, and checks; together with an examination of some of the questions which the statute suggests.

The mechanical execution of these volumes is very superior.

Se

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