A TEXT-BOOK ON COMMERCIAL LAW; A Manual of the Fundamental Principles Governing NEW YORK!ELANGST CLARK & MAYNARD, PUBLISHERS, 734 BROADWAY. 1883. PREFACE. THE design of the author in this volume has been to present, simply and compactly, the principles of law affecting the ordinary transactions of commercial life, in the form of a class-book for schools and commercial colleges. Youths who are soon to take an active part in business matters should certainly know something of the responsibilities they are to assume, the legal consequences of their acts. This That heretofore this subject has formed but a small part of the ordinary educational system, is due partly, perhaps, to the idea that law is too weighty and intricate to be taught to the young. would be so were it taught at all in detail, or technically. But, it is thought, a book confining itself to principles, stating them in the plainest language, and presenting them as a consistent and interdependent system, would be useful. A knowledge of principles is often the only guide one has, and it must be useful because it indicates the general rule. Every man does govern his actions, in business and elsewhere, upon some principles gained or stumbled upon in the course of his experience. But it were much better to have these, and many others which could not be learned from experience, planted in the mind while it was plastic. Experience also gives its principles merely as isolated facts; a book does, or should, give them in their proper relations, and show how, as is very often the case, what appears to be an exception to some rule is but the application of one more important. Again the study of its principles must impress one with the fact that law is in the main only common sense and common morality, a conviction which |