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law in his work, that is, his right to keep his manuscript in his strong box; for this was his only right until the statute of copyright enlarged his property, limiting at the same time its duration. The defendant has not infringed this common-law right of the author." But the court held otherwise, and the musical pirate has "gone home" to think it over. We never heard of a more righteous and considerate decision that is, hardly ever.

NOTES OF CASES.

son, 7 Pet. 348, 393, Judge Story says: 'Nothing can be clearer, both upon principle and authority, than the doctrine that to make an ante-nuptial settlement void as a fraud upon creditors, it is necessary that both parties should concur in or have cognizance of the intended fraud. If the settler alone intended a fraud, and the other party have no notice of it, but is innocent of it, she is not, and cannot be, affected by it.'" "It does not appear that Mrs. Watson knew, or had any reason to believe, that Mr. Watson was insolvent, or indebted even, or that she had any knowledge of his pecuniary con

HE Supreme Court of Georgia entertain a differ-dition, except that which she admits in her answer,

THE

ent view of the meaning of the word "extraordinary," from the New York courts. The latter are very liberal in their construction of the word in the statute for extra allowances for costs. The former, in Cox v. Hillyer, February, 1880, 10 Rep. 260, interpreting the phrase "extraordinary motion. or case," in the statute concerning new trials in criminal cases, hold that it means "such as do not ordinarily occur in the transaction of human affairs, as when a man has been convicted of murder, and it afterward turns out that the man he was charged with having killed is still alive; or where a man has been convicted on the testimony of a witness who is afterward found guilty of perjury in giving that testimony, or from some providential cause, and cases of like character." Speaking of the particular case, they say: "The newly-discovered evidence relating to the physical condition of the defendant at the time of his trial, as well as that relating to the main issues involved in the case on that trial, is merely cumulative in its character, and would hardly De sufficient of itself to have authorized the court to have set aside the verdict in an ordinary motion for a new trial; it is certainly not sufficient to authorize an extraordinary motion for a new trial to be made."

In National Exchange Bank v. Watson, 13 R. I. 78, the court upheld an ante-nuptial settlement as against creditors, the grantee being innocent, although an untrue consideration was stated, the deed was not recorded, and the grantor made repairs and improvements on the estate conveyed. They said: Marriage is deemed in law a valuable considera

tion.

that he told her he was in easy circumstances and abundantly able to make the conveyance, and that he was regarded in the community as a man of property."

In Pennsylvania Co. v. Miller, 35 Ohio St. 541, it was held that: (1) The implied undertaking of a carrier to insure the safety of baggage does not extend to the contents of a trunk, consisting of samples of merchandise, which the passenger, a travelling salesman, carries to facilitate his business in making sales. (2) But the carrier, by taking the property into his charge and putting it in his warehouse for safe-keeping, assumes the relation to it of an ordinary bailee, and he is bound to take such care of the property as a man of ordinary prudence would of his own, under like circumstances. Counsel cited in support of the first holding: "Macrow v. R. R. Co., I. R. 6 Q. B. 612; Railroad Co. v. Shepperd, 8 Exch. 30; Cahill v. Railroad Co., 13 C. B. 818; Phelps v. Railroad Co., 19 id. 321; Wilson v. Railroad Co., 56 Me. 60; 9 Wend. 85; Pardee v. Drew, 25 id. 459; Hawkins v. Hoffman, 6 Hill, 586; Stoneman v. Railroad Co., 52 N. Y. 429; Perley v. Railroad Co., 65 id. 374; Sloman v. Railroad Co., 67 id. 208; Weeks v. Railroad Co., 72 id. 50; S. C., 28 Am. Rep. 104; Jordan v. Railroad Co., 5 Cush. 69; Collins v. Railroad Co., 10 id. 506; Stimpson v. Railroad Co., 98 Mass. 83; id. 371; Railroad Co. v. Shea, 66 Ill. 471; Railroad Co. v. Carrow, 73 id. 348; S. C., 24 Am. Rep. 248. To these may be added: Alling v. Boston & Albany Railroad Co., 126 Mass. 121; S. C., 30 Am. Rep. 667. In support of the second holding, counsel cited: Cincinnati & Chicago R. R. v. Marcus, 38 Ill. 219; Mich. S. & N. Ind. R. R. Co. v. Oehm, 56 id. 293; Camden & AmR. R. v. Baldauf, 16 Penn. St. 67; 2 Redf. Am. Railw. Cas. 267; 2 Smith and Bates' Am. Railw. Cas. 357; Minter v. Pacific R. R. Co., 41 Mo. 503; Butler v. Hudson River R. R. Co., 3 E. D. Smith, Hannibal R. R. Co. v. Swift, 12 Wall. 262; Bartholomew v. St. Louis R. R., 53 Ill. 227; S. C., 5 Am. Rep. 45; Dexter v. Syracuse, Binghamton & New York R. R. Co., 42 N. Y. 326; Phillips v. Earl, 8 Pick. 182; 4 Bing. 218; Relf v. Rapp, 3 W. & S. 21.

A conveyance, therefore, in consideration of marriage, stands upon a different footing from a vol-boy untary conveyance. All the authorities agree to this extent, at least, that a man, though indebted, may settle a portion of his property on his intended wife, and that in the absence of fraud, the settle-571; ment, if no more than a reasonable provision for the wife, will be upheld against existing as well as subsequent creditors. Campion v. Cotton, 17 Ves. Jun. 264, 271, 272; Armfield v. Armfield, Freeman (Miss.), 311, 316; Croft v. Arthur, 3 Des. 223, 232; Buckner v. Smyth, 4 id. 371, 372; Davidson v. Graves, Riley's Eq. 232, 235-238; Magniac v. Thompson, 7 A nice question was decided by the Exchequer Pet. 348, 393; Marshall v. Morris, 16 Ga. 368, 373, Division, in Winspear v. Accident Ins. Co., 42 L. T. 374; Smith v. Allen, 5 Allen, 454, 458; Bonser v. (N. S.) 900. The policy insured against any perMiller, 5 Or. 110, 112." "In Magniac v. Thomp-sonal injury caused by accidental external visible

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means, within the intention of the policy and its provisions, and the direct effect of such injury should occasion his death within three calendar months from the happening of such injury;" it being further provided that no claim should be made under the policy "for any injury from any accident unless such injury should be caused by some outward and visible means, of which proof satisfactory to the directors could be furnished, and that the insurance should not extend to * * ** * any injury caused by or arising from natural disease or weakness or exhaustion consequent upon disease, or any medical or surgical treatment or operation rendered necessary by disease; or to any death arising from disease, although such death may have been accelerated by accident." Whilst the policy was in force, W., in crossing and fording a stream or brook, was seized with an epileptic fit, and fell down in the said stream, and then and there, whilst suffering such fit, was drowned. He did not sustain any personal injury to occasion death other than drowning. Held, that a recovery could be had by his executors. Kelly, C. B., could "not bring himself to entertain a shadow of doubt in the matter." The inquiry was, what was the causa causans? "If there be a meaning in words, and if the English language admits of a statement with a plain and grammatical meaning of the cause of an individual's death, it is to my apprehension clear that here drowning was the cause, and the only cause, of the death of the insured. The drowning may have been occasioned by the deceased having falling down in the water from the fit of epilepsy, and that fit may have been occasioned by a constitutional habit of body, making it dangerous for him to expose his limbs to the action of cold water, the one cause preceding the other, and being what logicians call the causa sine quâ non, but for which the death would perhaps not have happened, but not being in the proper sense of the word the actual proximate cause of death. The real causa causans in this case was the influx of water into the deceased man's lungs, and the consequent stoppage of his breath, and so he was drowned. Any thing which led to that, such as his being, if he were, subject to epileptic fits, or being seized with a fit while crossing the stream, would be a causa sine quá non. If he had not had the fit he probably would have crossed the stream in safety, but that does not make the fit the causa causans, the actual proximate cause of his death." The question then arose, was a death by drowning within the policy? On this point, the learned judge quoted from Trew v. Ry. Passengers' Ass. Co., 6 H. & N. 839, where Cockburn, C. J., said: "Mr. Lush ingeniously puts it that, to be within the policy, the death must be from some vis major, from something without; that where the cause is one that would produce immediate death without any outward lesion, it is not a case within the policy, and therefore that the policy does not apply to the case of a death by the action of water. If this be correct, the case of a man who fell from the top of a high house, or one who fell overboard from a ship, or a case of suffocation by fire, would not be within the

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policy. But we do not accede to this argument; and we think that a case of death by drowning is a case of death by accident within the meaning of the policy for which the defendants are liable." dleston, B., in the principal case was "not without considerable doubt," but "after some hesitation" coincided with the chief baron. He observed: "It cannot be said in this case that the injury was caused directly by the epileptic fit. It was caused by immersion in the water and the consequent suffocation which was the direct cause of the death, and therefore it does not come within the clause of the policy by which the directors seek to protect themselves in case of the insured's death arising from disease or from exhaustion consequent thereupon."

WE

OPPONENTS OF THE CODE.

E lately paid our compliments to Chief Justice Ryan, of Wisconsin, on some admirable passages in his address to the law class of the University of his State. The learned gentleman's opinion of the New York Code of Procedure, conveyed in the same address, does not so much commend itself

to our minds. He says: "This State is suffering to-day from a notable instance of unwise and unhallowed tampering with the common law. The system of pleading and proceeding in the courts of the common law, which had grown up with generations of lawyers and survived them, matured by the experience of ages, rested in the surest principles of logic and of law. It was, in some things, over technical. It had excrescences and absurdities —— faults which embarrassed or impeded justice. But these were frailties not essential to the system, which might be easily weeded out from it. Elsewhere they have been, leaving the hereditary wisdom, the adjudicated certainty of the system, redeemed from its defects. But in several States, as in this, it has been arbitrarily abolished - sacrificing the essential wisdom of the system for its accidental faults. And under pretense of simplifying the administration of law, and facilitating justice, there has been substituted for it a crude and mischievous theory, which, attempting to dispense with skill, dispenses with certainty and security, embarrasses the processes of the law, unsettles much, far beyond its purpose, which was settled before; has vastly increased litigation and its cost; has impeded justice, and added to the uncertainty of the law. If it survive, it will need exposition for generations of judges, before its innovations, in all their scope and effect, will be settled; and then it will be more or less of an evil, as the courts shall have given it, more or less, of likeness to the system which it displaced. Its simplicity is a cheat. It is loose, not simple. Its plainness is a fraud. It is vague, not plain. It makes the remedies of the law a paradise of doubt and ambiguity."

An eminent South Carolina lawyer says, as we learn from the Virginia Law Journal, that "the system would convert any bar in the country into a set of pettifoggers." The Journal falls in with these eminent authorities, but has the candor to admit

that it "knows little or nothing of these sys

tems.'

Prof. Tyler says, in his edition of Stephens on Pleading, that the "love of innovation carried its abolition in New York, and that other States have followed in this barbaric empiricism."

Judge Cooley says that the "works on commonlaw pleading are not superseded by the new codes which have been introduced in so many States. After a trial of the code system for many years, its friends must confess that there is something more than form in the old system of pleading, and that the lawyer who has learned to state his cause in a logical manner after the rules laid down by Stephens and Gould is better prepared to draw a pleading under the Code which will stand the test of demurrer, than the man who without that training undertakes to tell his story to the court as he might tell it to a neighbor, and who never having accustomed himself to a strict and logical presentation of precise facts which constitute the legal cause of action or the legal defense, is in danger of stating so much or so little as to leave his rights in doubt on his own showing."

Mr. George F. Moore, of Alabama, in an able address on Code Pleading and Practice in Alabama, while he disagrees with Prof. Tyler, agrees with Judge Cooley, but in criticizing a compromise system, such as is recommended by Chief Justice Ryan, says: "We have now neither the commonlaw system of pleading nor a Code of Procedure such as prevails in New York. Our system is genuine hybrid — the offspring of demagoguery and timidity. Too timid to take the reformed codes, our codifiers only adopted so much of them as sufficed to appease the innovators."

rect the mis-translations of the old? There is a homely adage, which we should apply to all these objectors, in no disrespectful sense, that it is hard to teach an old dog new tricks. This exactly expresses the case of the learned chief justice and the eminent South Carolina gentleman. All such laudatores temporis acti may as well recognize the fact, however, that the reform of law is not to stand still to save them the trouble of learning new lessons in their old age. This horrible Juggernaut-car of codification and simplification is going right along, let them wring their hands and throw themselves under the wheels as they will. In view of the experience and approval of thirty years and the constantlygrowing approval and adoption of the new system, the wails of these learned gentlemen are, not to put too fine a point upon it, simply ludicrous.

The trouble with all these objectors is that they obstinately and persistently shut their eyes to the requirements of the Code, and misconstrue and misrepresent it. We agree with Judge Cooley that a lawyer, experienced under the old system, is a better pleader under the new than one who "undertakes to tell his story as he might tell it to a neighbor," or as Mr. O'Conor says, as an old woman tells it to her lawyer. But this kind of story-telling is not what the Code requires, and New York lawyers have learned the fact, and have successfully conformed themselves to the situation. The following is Chief Justice Ryan's "paradise of doubt and ambiguity": "The complaint must contain a plain and concise statement of the facts, constituting a cause of action, without unnecessary repetition.' The answer, in addition to denials, may set up counter-claims ' in ordinary and concise language, without repetition.' The plaintiff may compel a sworn answer, by verifying the complaint. In considering pleadings for the purpose of determining their effect, they shall be liberally construed, with a view of substantial justice between the parties.' If pleadings are so indefinite or uncertain that the precise nature of the charge or defense is not apparent, the court may require them to be made definite or certain by amendment.' No variance between plead

We would suggest to the violent opponents of the New York Code that they are exaggerating the virtues of the old and the vices of the new system. If any thing tended to make a pettifogger of a lawyer, it was the verbal subtleties and tricks of the old system of special pleading. New York lawyers are not "a set of pettifoggers." English lawyers do not think themselves in danger of becoming "a set of pettifoggers." This sort of talk sounds strangeings to lawyers who have lost their case because they had declared in trespass instead of trespass on the case; who had erroneously concluded to the country; or who, like Bryant, had not made proper inuendoes in a declaration for slander. This was the true pettifoggery. Our old Code was clearly expounded in less than a "generation," and the new one seems to need and to receive but little exposition. This work should inure to the benefit of all States adopting our Code or a similar Code, and would, were it not for obstinate judges. Our practice is almost perfectly settled and entirely satisfactory.

The same conservatism which characterizes Chief Justice Ryan would object to new modes of teaching in our schools, and to a revision of the Bible. If he thinks the common law so holy, and modifications of it "unhallowed," will he, we wonder, consent to read the new Bible, which seeks to omit the forgeries, change the awkward expressions, and cor

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and proof is material, 'unless it actually have misled the adverse party to his prejudice;' and even then 'the court may order the pleading to be amended, upon such terms as shall be just.' The party may amend his own pleading under certain circumstances and in certain particulars, as a matter of course, and the court may always, on motion, amend the pleading 'in furtherance of justice' and on proper terms. And finally, the court shall, in every stage of an action, disregard any error or defect in the pleadings or proceedings, which shall not affect the substantial rights of the adverse party.""

The New York Times well says of our Code: "It discarded at once the perplexing sinuosities of law practice and the long-drawn delays of equity. In prescribing the fusion of these two systems; in allowing an assignee or any real party in interest to sue in his own name; in abrogating forms of action, special pleading and fictions, and burying John Doe

and family in a common grave; in authorizing a disregard for technical and formal errors, and giving liberal permission to make amendments; in rescinding the rule which forbade the testimony of a party or interested person to be heard, and inviting all who have personal knowledge of facts to tell what they know --it opposed nearly all the traditions and precedents. But it won favor abroad as well as at home. Fully half the States and nearly all the Territories have adopted the general spirit and important characteristics of the new method, while many have even re-enacted its details. It has been the guide in molding the practice now pursued in most of the British Colonies, and its principles are well known to have been very influential in framing the procedure recently established in England."

The honest truth is that word-spinning, the verbal subtleties,deceptions,evasions, and lies, called "pleading at common law," and the tricks of lawyers in trying to entrap judges into erroneous instructions, have done much to render law tedious and expensive, and lawyers hateful to the community. Mr. Moore gives a vivid picture of the way in which lawyers too frequently deal with judges. He says: "When the counsel are requested to read their charges, Brother Teazle reads his in this way: he has prepared ten charges; five of them are amazingly bad, three are vicious, but two are perfectly good ones. He reads say, three of the very bad ones. they are refused then one of those not quite so bad, and the judge also refuses that; then one of those that ought to be given -and in the hurry of the trial the judge refuses that also; and before time is given for reflection, he reads another of the very bad charges and repeats the process. This is what is called 'catching out' the judge, as it is practiced under our system of hypothetical charges. This system is indeed only a weak substitute for special pleading. One is made in the form of positive averments before the trial is had; the other in the form of hypotheses after the evidence is heard. No argument is heard on these charges, and the reports of the Supreme Court show that the giving and refusal of charges on the ground of their tendency to mislead the jury is one of the most common sources of error in the trial of causes, and hence of great delay and injustice. Great numbers of charges are requested, and a general charge is given by the

court. The jury get in a maze, and the result is, as every lawyer may know, who will take the trouble to inquire, that very frequently the jury does not even read the charges." This part of a trial is generally a struggle of wits between bench and bar.

Perhaps the liberty of amendment is carried to an unusual extreme in Alabama, but unless so, we should be surprised at these words of Mr. Moore: "This liberty of amendment is a Pandora's-box for any system of pleading. No language is strong enough to characterize its evil effects. It is a cancer in the body of our system of pleading, and incurable except by the use of the knife. The court permits the amendment, defendant is surprised and another continuance and trial is the result." The

doctrine of variance was one of the most oppressive and detestable features of the old system, as the doctrine of amendment is one of the most humane and beneficial of the new.

To all devotees of intricate form and opponents of simplicity we commend the three following extracts: "Procedure is only the machinery of the law the channel whereby it is administered and the means whereby justice is reached; and it departs from its proper office when it is allowed to obstruct and even extinguish legal rights, instead of facilitating them, and thus governs where it ought to subserve." Lord Penzance in dissenting opinion in Kendall v. Hamilton, 28 W. R. 101.

"The commercial world must, we should imagine, be occasionally startled by the amazing perplexity of the English law upon points which are entirely governed by judicial decision, and in relation to matters which are of the utmost simplicity." Law Times.

"We may not sacrifice the principle to the very form by which we are endeavoring to enforce it. Principles can never be realized without forms, and they are often inevitably embarrassed by unfitting ones; but still the fact that the form is for the sake of the principles, and not the principle for the form, requires that the form shall serve, not rule, the principle, and must be adapted to its office." Forsythe v. Wells, 41 Penn. St. 291.

Et per contra: "In matters of technical law the rule is of more importance than the reason of it." Chief Justice Parker, in Bloss v. Tobey, 2 Pick. 320.

THE CONFLICT OF TREATIES AND LAWS.

TREA

BY SAMUEL T. SPEAR, D. D.

REATIES made "under the authority of the United States," and laws of Congress enacted in pursuance of the Constitution, are in the sixth article of the Constitution declared to be parts of "the supreme law of the land," without any discrimination between them as to their relative rank. What then would be the legal consequence if these two parts of "the supreme law should be in such conflict with each other that both could not operate as supreme laws at the same time and among the same people? This question supposes that the subject-matter involved is essentially the same, and also that the treaty power and the legislative power of Congress are equally applicable to it. The question has more than a speculative interest, since in several instances it has been practically necessary to answer it.

Mr. Madison, in 1791, gave his opinion as follows: "Treaties, as I understand the Constitution,are made su preme over the constitutions and laws of the particular States, and, like a subsequent law of the United States, over pre-existing laws of the United States, provided, however, that the treaty be within the prerogative of making treaties, which, no doubt, has certain limits." Writings of Madison, vol. 1, p. 524.

Alexander Hamilton says: "It is a question among some theoretical writers, whether a treaty can repeal pre-existing laws. This question must always be answered by the particular form of government of each nation. In our Constitution, which gives ipso facto the force of law to treaties, making them equally with the acts of Congress the supreme law of the land, a treaty must necessarily repeal antecedent law contrary

to it, according to the legal maxim that leges posteriores priores contrarias abrogant." Works of Hamilton, vol. 7, p. 512.

Mr. Rawle, in his treatise on the Constitution, p. 56, refers to treaties as "being, next to the Constitution, the supreme law of the land," and as prevailing “over all State laws, State constitutions, and acts of Congress." P. 59. "The immediate operation of the treaty," he says, "must therefore be to overrule all existing legislative acts inconsistent with its provisions." He, however, admits that Congress "may pass subsequent laws, qualifying, altering, or even wholly annulling a treaty."

Attorney-General Crittenden, 5 Op. Att.-Gen. 345, says: "An act of Congress, then, is as much a supreme law of the land as a treaty. They are placed on the same footing, and no preference or superiority is given to one over the other. The last expression, then, of the law-giving power must prevail; and just for the same reason, and on the same principle, that a subsequent act must prevail and have effect, though inconsistent with a prior act, so must an act of Congress have effect, though inconsistent with a prior treaty." Attorney-General Cushing, 6 Op. Att.-Gen. 293, says: "A treaty, assuming it to be made conformably to the Constitution, in substance and form, has the effect of repealing, under the general conditions of the legal doctrine that leges posteriores priores contrarius abrogant, all pre-existing Federal laws in conflict with it, whether unwritten, as the law of nations, of admiralty, and common law, or written, as acts of Congress." Attorney-General Ackerman, 13 Op. Att.-Gen. 357, says: "By the sixth article of the Constitution, treaties as well as statutes are laws of the land. There is nothing in the Constitution which assigns different rauks to treaties and to statutes. The Constitution itself is of higher rank than either by the very structure of the Government. A statute not inconsistent with it, and a treaty not inconsistent with it, relating to subjects within the scope of the treaty-making power, seem to stand upon the same level, and to be of equal validity; and as in the case of all laws emanating from equal authority, the earlier in date yields to the later."

The doctrine sustained by these opinions is that a treaty made subsequently to the enactment of a law by Congress repeals the law to the extent of any inconsistency between the two, and that a law enacted by Congress subsequently to the making of a treaty has the same effect upon the treaty. The principle works either way and with equal efficacy.

The first case in which the courts of this country passed upon this question is that of The United States v. The Schooner Peggy, 1 Cranch, 103. The Peggy was a French armed vessel captured on the 24th of April, 1800, by an American ship authorized by the President of the United States to make the capture. Under the act of Congress of July 7, 1798, she was libelled and condemned as a lawful prize in the District Court of the United States for Connecticut, and the decree was subsequently confirmed by the Circuit Court. 1 U. S. Stat. at Large, 578.

The case was carried by appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States, and while it was there pending the United States made a treaty with France, the fourth article of which provided that "property captured and not yet definitely condemned, or which may be captured before the exchange of ratifications (contraband goods destined to an enemy's port excepted), shall be mutually restored on the following proofs of ownership," etc. 8 U. S. Stat. at Large, 178.

The condemnation of the Peggy was by the Supreme Court regarded as lawful at the time of the decree, yet a treaty having intervened before the final disposal of the case, and that treaty having changed the rule of law in application to it, Chief Justice Marshall holding

that the question as to this property was still in coutroversy, and therefore not "definitely" settled in the sense of the treaty, said that in "this case the court must decide according to the existing laws, and if it be necessary, to set aside a judgment lawful when rendered, but which cannot be affirmed but in violation of law," namely, the treaty with France. The treaty was in effect held to (repeal the law under which the condemnation was pronounced, nullifying all the proceedings in the courts below, though valid at the time. The treaty being subsequent to the law and a part of "the supreme law of the land," had established another and different rule for the guidance of the court. Proceeding under this rule, the court ordered the Peggy to be restored.

In Foster v. Neilson, 2 Pet. 253, Chief Justice Marshall said that a treaty is "to be regarded as equivalent to an act of the Legislature whenever it operates of itself without the aid of any legislative provision." And, in applying this principle, he further said that if the treaty of 1818 with Spain had directly operated on the subject-matter before the court, it "would have repealed those acts of Congress which were repugnant to it," and consequently furnished the rule for deciding the case. The power of a treaty that acts proprio vigore upon the question involved without legislative aid, to repeal an existing law of Congress preceding it but inconsistent with it, is here distinctly affirmed.

In The Clinton Bridge, 1 Wool. 150, the question arose, whether the act of Congress of February 27, 1867, declaring this bridge erected across the Mississippi river to be "a lawful structure," and that it should "be recognized and known as a post route," was not a violation of "the obligations of certain treaties between the United States and foreign nations which in effect declare that the navigation of the Mississippi river shall remain free and unmolested forever." 14 U. S. Stat. at Large, 412.

These treaties were urged as an objection to the validity of the act of Congress. In reference to this point Mr. Justice Miller said: "

"We need not inquire whether the treaties referred to were designed to affect such cases as the one before the court or not; for we are of opinion that, whatever obligation they may have imposed upon the Government, the courts possess no power to declare a statute passed by Congress, and approved by the President, void because it may violate such obligations. Questions of this class are international questions, and are to be settled between the foreign nations interested in the treaties and the political departments of the Government. When those departments declare a treaty abrogated, annulled, or modified, it is not for the judicial branch of the Government to set it up, or assert its continued existence."

In Ropes et al. v. Clinch, 8 Blatchf. 304, it was claimed that the sixth article of the treaty of 1832 between the United States and Russia, providing that no higher duties shall be imposed on the importation into the United States of any article, being the produce or manufacture of Russia, than are or shall be payable on the like article, being the produce or manufacture of any other foreign country, was violated by the act of Congress of August 5, 1861, imposing a duty of forty dollars per ton on unmanufactured Russian hemp, while the duty on Manilla and other hemps of India was only twenty-five dollars per ton. 8 U. S. Stat. at Large, 444, and 12 U. S. Stat. at Large, 291. The duty on the former kind of hemp being exacted by the collector at the port of New York, as prescribed by tho law, and paid under protest, as being contrary to the treaty with Russia, a suit was brought by the plaintiffs against the collector, to recover the excess of duties beyond twenty-five dollars per ton. This raised the question whether the law or the treaty furnished the rule for the guidance of the court.

In regard to this point Judge Woodruff said:

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