v. Insurance Co., 40 Iowa, 551; Hathaway v. Insurance Co., 64 id. 229; Keeler v. Insurance Co., 16 Wis. 523; Wood v. Insurance Co., 31 Vt. 552. An examination of the cases above cited will disclose that the conditions in the policies, where forfeiture for alienation was sustained, were materially different from the one involved in this action, except perhaps in the cases in 30 Penn. St. 311, and that in 16 Wis. 523, where the language of the condition was very similar to that now under consideration. In the other cases sustaining the forfeiture, the condition contained a provision forfeiting the policy, not merely for a 'sale or transfer' of the property, but in case of a change of title' or the sale of 'any undivided interest therein' (23 Ind. 179), in case of a 'change of title' (10 Mich. 279), or any change took place in the title or possession' (51 Conn. 222; 20 Fed. Rep. 657), and therefore they cannot be rightfully claimed as direct authorities for the insurance company in the case at bar. In the case in 40 Iowa, 551, the condition against alienation was very similar to those above quoted; but the Supreme Court of Iowa held that nothing less than a sale of the entire interest of the party insured would defeat the policy.' This doctrine was maintained by Drummond, J., in 4 Biss. 511. Heretofore this precise question has not been before this court, and in the conflict of authorities respecting it we feel at liberty to adopt that rule upon the subject which most nearly accords with the policy of our decisions and the presumed intention of the parties. It is the policy of this court to strictly construe those clauses in an insurance policy which forfeit the indemnity provided for the assured. West v. Insurance Co., 27 Ohio St. 1. * * * It was competent for the policy to provide, expressly, that a sale of a part of the property or of an interest therein should avoid the policy. This they did not do. The absence of a specific provision to that effect, when it could have been so easily inserted, together with the rule before referred to, that conditions which defeat a policy should be construed strictly against the forfeiture, leads us to hold that a sale of the entire interest of the party insured was necessary to avoid the policy. In a strict legal sense perhaps wherever one engaged in business alone takes a partner into his business, or a firm receives a new member, or a member goes out, the transaction results in the formation of a new concern, accompanied by a sale and transfer of all the property of the old establishment to the new one; but it is at least doubtful whether this strict legal result is contemplated by the business world generally. That the parties in the case before us intended the policy should be avoided in case the assured received a partner into his business is uncertain. That the plaintiff understood the transaction to be a sale of an undivided half of the property and busines to Horman, rather than a sale of the whole of it to a firm composed of himself and Horman, is quite probable. It was competent for the parties to provide in unambiguous terms that if the assured received into the business, without the consent of the insurer, a partner, the policy should become void. This was not done, and we think the principles already announced require us to hold that the sale and transfer resulting from the reception of a partner did not avoid the policy. Notwithstanding the transaction, the plaintiff retained a substantial and insurable interest in the property covered by the policy, while, to avoid the policy on account of the provision against alienation, it should have divested him of his entire interest." See Powers v. Ins. Co., 136 Mass. 108; S. C., 49 Am. Rep. 20, and note, 22. ADDRESS OF FRANK B. LOWN, ESQ., ON Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Bar Association: This is not the time or place for any extended panegyric upon his life and services. His position at the bar, not only in his own county, but in the State at large, made his presence a familiar one to most of you, and his abilities and attainments were weighed and passed upon while living. And if his eulogy were to be pronounced at this time and upon this occasion, it would address itself with the more force to your members, were it to proceed from one removed from the sphere of personal and daily contact with the deceased; and concerning whom it could not be urged that admiration and affection for the dead rendered him an unfit person to dispassionately and justly record the virtues and attributes of our dead associate. Your association however may well owe to its distinguished members the duty of handing down some slight memorial of those who have died while in its service to which succeeding generations of lawyers and members may turn. Homer A. Nelson was born in Poughkeepsie, on the 31st day of August, 1829, and was therefore in the sixty-second year of his age when called away. Educated in his native city, he was called to the bar in 1850, and speedily attained a high rank in his profession. At the early age of twenty-six he was elected county judge of Dutchess county, and served in this capacity for eight years. During all of his life he was actively engaged in practice, diversified only by the periods spent in public office, he having served successive terms as State senator and secretary of State. He was a member of the Constitutional Convention of 1867, and rendered valuable services in the consideration of the important questions submitted to the convention. Judge Nelson was not of the type that look only to the gain to be derived in professional practice. He recognized in the fullest sense the duty that every lawyer owes to his profession. Whether in the Senate, at the head of the judiciary committee, a position he filled during his term of office, or in the other positions to which he was chosen, he performed the important and often onerous duties imposed upon him, with the same unflagging industry, energy and fidelity he manifested in his private practice, and the time and strength often needed for himself and his individual clients were freely and ungrudgingly bestowed in the service of the people. From the very organization of your association he took an active interest in its affairs. He was one of the first to sign the roll of membership, and was a member of the first executive committee, and from that time until his death he served your association faithfully and well in the various positions to which he was chosen by your members. The various discussions before your body were enlightened by the acuteness and power of his reasoning, and were enlivened by the wit and humor with, which they were so freely adorned. One of the very last acts of his life was the transmission to your secretary, of an outline of the work to be done by the committee on grievances, of which he was the chairman. His death came with peculiar sadness to every one. Gifted with a fine presence and strong physique, death doubtless seemed remote to him as it did to us. His life had been one of hard work, and he felt the need of relaxation or rest. Blest with a competence, the fruit of a life of work, he proposed to come back to his native city to spend the later years of his life with his family and friends. He did not intend to rust out the remainder of his existence, but only to leave the hurly burly of professional life, and perform only such modicum of chosen work as might be agreeable to him. He proposed out of his new abundance of leisure to give more time to work of a character with that carried on by your association, and to discharge even more fully than he had done the duty he conceived he owed to his profession. But in the very hour of return, at the very threshold of his longed-for rest and retirement, when the very boxes and belongings in his New York offices, were corded and packed for transmission to his home, a summons came, attested by a higher than earthly tribunal, and he passed into the completest rest of all. It is by reason of his record as a faithful lawyer, and as a member of your association, and of his services to it, and of his appreciation of its aims and purposes, that we offer you this portrait of our late friend and associate. It is perhaps as faithful as pigment and canvas can be, and yet it is but a soulless counterfeit. We would that we could impart sparkle to the eye and animation to the countenance-that we could by the exercise of some wondrous power produce him as he was, but our poor gift is the measure of our utmost endeavor. We ask you to take it, to hang it on your walls among the portraits of those also deemed worthy of commemoration, so that so far as may be your association may keep in kind remembrance one who was a faithful member, an accomplished lawyer and a good man. President Diven, on receiving the portrait in behalf of the association, said: "The beautiful and lifelike portrait of the late Hon. Homer A. Nelson, our honored and esteemed associate in this association and at the bar of the State, is in every way worthy the distinguished original. It will be placed in the rooms of the State Bar Association with other portraits of the great lights and ornaments of the judiciary and the bar of the State of New York. It is indeed an appropriate place for the face and semblance of Homer A. Nelson. We accept it, sir, with emotions of sadness which I will not attempt to describe. As we mourn his loss, we mourn the loss of other members of our association-of Ruger, of Angle, of Douglass, of Schwartz, Corlett and McCartin, who have, with one exception, left us since our last annual meeting. Their lives, like Nelson's, were useful, distinguished, prosperous, and in all that makes the sum of human experience, judicial, professional, civic or domestic, they won the commendation of the public, the bar and private citizen." RESPECT FOR THE LAW-RESPONSIBILITY OF THE PROFESSION. Delivered before the Annual Meeting of the New York State Bar Association, by Dr. Melville M. Bigelow. Mr. President and Gentlemen; Ladies and Gentlemen: The distinguished liberal unionist leader of Birmingham-over-sea told a story in a recent speech of a son of Erin, whose sous appear to have been born to plague and to please the world in equal measure-what would the world be without them? Au Irishman was found standing before a mirror with his eyes shut. When asked what he was doing, he said that he was trying to see how he looked when asleep. Mr. Chamberlain made an application of the story to his political opponents, which I fancy they will resent. going to apply the story to my own household of faith, to the great profession of which I delight to call my self a member, and the application, I venture to believe, will not be resented. I am Is it not true, sir, is it not very true, that we are keeping our eyes shut to evils for which we are largely responsible, and while refusing, or at least neglecting, to see them, are casting about in our minds'to discover what is really going on, and then picturing to ourselves a pleasant prospect of green fields in a land of plenty? Now and then something disturbs and upsets the fond conceit; we arouse ourselves; we gird on our armor; we "march up a hill-and then march down again," and directly we fall to dreaming as before, what fine fellows we are, how serene are all things and we are the greaterp art! Or, to change the figure, we fancy the world bowling along through ether seas how famously, and we have a hand on the helm. We are trying, with our eyes shut, to see what we are doing in the world. Let us not deal overmuch in compliments. At best compliments are easy, and a compliment not obviously sincere is a thing to be scorned by every rightminded man. But I must be permitted to say that, so far as the distinguished body whom I to-day address is concerned, the picture with which I have opened is overdrawn. The moment after accepting your kind invitation to deliver the annual address, I set myself to the matter in hand, and had written thus far, in the delusion that I really was living in the center of the world, and that what I saw around me, and in New England generally, could not fall far short of the state of things which existed elsewhere. I had written: "We are trying, with our eyes shut, to see what we are doing," theu came a shock. A letter from your learned secretary came to hand, inclosing his last annual report, and let me confess it, that revealed a state of things I was totally ignorant of. A "state of things?" Nay, indeed, an activity as inspiring as it is intelligent, or rather inspiring because it is so intelligent. But I was now embarrassed. I had thought out no small part of my address, and had written the opening passage on the lines of my own limited observation. Should I tear up the opening, face about, and start anew on different lines? I know not what may be the experience of others, my own has led me to distrust first impressions and first impulses; with me the event has generally proved them wrong. And so I thought again before acting, and the result was that I determined to go on as I had begun. Your proceedings, I was reminded, find their way very soon into every State in the Union, so that what is said in this is said in a far larger presence. Your honored guests on this platform speak not only to the profession and the citizenship of your own State, but to the country at large; to New England, to the middle, the southern and the western States. I am sure that the line of thought upon which I first struck out cannot be unsuited to a large part of your constituency beyond the Empire State. But can one justly stand here only to speak to other parts of the country? Clearly not. If I have nothing to say to the bar association here assembled, this is no place for me. And after all that you have done and are doing, I cannot but believe that there is occasion even here of calling attention to certain perils of the State for which the profession, in New York as well as elsewhere, is largely responsible, to which, in New York as elsewhere, the profession is too apt to close its eyes. Let me put my finger at once upon the one great evil, an evil which includes nearly all others, for which the profession, the bar more than the bench, no doubt, but I must say the bench also, is largely responsible. That evil is the manifest lowering in recent years of respect for the law. I do not say respect for lawyers. On our heads the world has always delighted to pour its satire and even its contempt. Our ways have been evil, and that continually. "I wouldn't make a downright lawyer o' the lad," said Mr. Tulliver, "I should be sorry for him to be a raskill-but a sort o' engineer, or a surveyor, or an auctioneer and vallyer like Riley. *** They are pretty nigh all one, and they're not far off being even wi' the law, I believe; for Riley looks lawyer Wakem i' the face as hard as one cat looks another." A hundred years ago and more a certain lawyer thought that matters had gone far enough and brought suit against a townsman for declaring in the presence of divers good and worthy men of England that he, the lawyer, "knew no more law than the devil." Objection was raised that there was no inunendo that the devil was not a good lawyer, and though the objection was not sustained, and the plaintiff was held entitled to recover, the decision has been doubted. Day v. Buller, 3 Wils. 59; Odgers Lib. & Sland. (1st ed.) 68. It is not, I repeat, the profession to which I refer as suffering loss of respect, it is the law. That assuredly is a serious thing. Need I argue in this presence the variety of the evil to which I refer? Certainly not, sir, to the members of your or of any other bar association; almost as certainly not to the audience of ladies and laymen here assembled. But the case may be different in regard to the nature and the extent of the evil, and lawyers, ladies and lay men alike will at least permit me to refresh the memory with two or three illustrations. With a definite picture or two thrown on the mind, we can proceed the better with our subject. Mr. Boyce, who has dealt most kindly with our American Commonwealth, and even with our serious failings, has made the world familiar with one illustration which but for him might not have been known outside of the State of New York, and a good one it is. You have in New York a constitutional provision which forbids private or local legislation for the purpose either of incorporating villages or of building bridges. I need hardly say to any in this audience that provisions of that kind are most salutary. Well for the nation if private legislation in general were everywhere restricted, by constitutional provision, within the narrowest limits. Jobbery and corruption are the inevitable attendants of private legislation. But to the illustration from Boyce. With the constitutional provision against private legislation touching bridges before their eyes, and adopting the solemn forms which the fathers had consecrated to noble ends -shall I say it?-unfaithful men, five or six years ago proceeded before all the world to circumvent the Constitution itself. A general act was first put through the Legislature" for the incorporation of villages with general provisions as to bridges." Very well; how childlike and bland! The following year the schemers are ready to play openly the game of the heathen Chinee. They now proceed to have the act of the year before amended, making it read thus: "All of the counties in this State are hereby exempted from the provisions of this act except the county of Westchester, but nothing in this act contained shall be construed so as to apply to the towns of Greenburgh and Mount Pleasant in said county of Westchester." 1 Boyce Am. Com. 529. And so the oppressed contractors and jobbers, whose bands, fashioned by a kind providence to serve their fellow men, had been tied by a cruel provision of the Constitution, are released from their duty to obey that troublesome instrument. Is comment needful? The Constitution is dishonored and defeated by its own guardians. And that illustration, one blushes to say it, is but one of a whole crop like it. You will allow me, regretfully I am sure, to give the substance of a passage from the well-known work of your guest of three years ago, Mr. Justice Cooley. In his Constitutional Limitations (6th ed.), p. 166, note, the distinguished author tells us that a practice has sprung up of evading a constitutional provisions of certain States against introducing bills in the Legislature within a certain period after the opening or before the close of a session, the purpose of which is obvious. The way that provision is evaded is this: Some one, who must be ready to smuggle through a vicious piece of legislation, introduces in due season a sham bill as a "stock to graft upon." The sham bill is perhaps a bill to incorporate the city of Siam. One of the member's constituents applies to him for legislative permission to construct a dam across the Wild Cat river. Forthwith, by amendment, the bill entitled a bill to incorporate the city of Siam has all after the en. acting clause stricken out, and it is made to provide, as its sole object, that John Doe may construct a dam across the Wild Cat. And so the bill is rushed through. Then the title is amended to make it state the truth, the bill as thus amended is finally put through in the prohibited period, and the Constitution at the same time saved! Rather let it be said "slain in the house of its friends." How, sir, in truth and soberness are such facts to be explained? How indeed but on the ground that the standard of respect for law has fallen from nerveless hands? Little by little the colors are lowered; at last they drop and are trodden in the mire. Not indeed by the good. God forbid! But after all by whom? By those whom the people send forth from their midst as their representatives. The vision of the people has been gradually, insensibly perhaps, dimmed, the moral sense has been dulled and so it is a small matter; the people do not care. What I have just said may serve to enforce a distinction. The habitual thief, especially if he has had the luck to escape the police, no doubt has small respect for the law, but that was always 80. The man or woman who is willing to make oath to any thing in the world at the custom-house has no great respect for the law against smuggling, at all events has no admiration for it, but that has always been so. The man who asks counsel to draw up an affidavit like a lawyer," and he will "swear to it like a man ”—I quote a piece of another's experience-has no respect for the law, but such things have always been. I do not refer to the cutpurse and the perjurer. No more do I refer to the common trait of selfishness in its advanced stage of avarice, which will tempt a man to go all lengths to get money; to the common spectacle, for example, of attempts to break wills without the smallest ground, in the hope of being bought off. This is not want of respect for law; it is want of respect for father or mother, and falls under a condemnation as oid as the race of Israel. The evil to which I refer is of more recent date. Even you and I, sir, are old enough to point to a time within our own lives when it was not. I do not mean to say that there was no want of respect for the law, such as I now refer to, before our time. I do not forget the subtle web of that piece of fine spun called special pleading, which beguiled and distorted the ingenuity of bench and bar alike for centuries, in delight of which judges of great ability could rule out of court some hapless suitor, having a really good cause, with the intimation that he might find comfort in the re- | flection that he had at all events been instrumental in establishing the law of absque hoc! (I cannot feel sure of my authority for this. It runs in my mind that I have read something of the kind of Baron Parke, though I may have mixed up two stories. But it is no mere piece of imagination.) The wonder is that the law did not suffer serious loss of respect long before the generation which swept away the rubbish. It must have been that the administration of justice on the whole was so fair and efficient that this defect could not detract from the general feeling of safety and respect, and indeed we all know that to be true. May I stop for a moment and cast a "lingering look behind" upon the golden age of our law, by which I mean the first half of the present century? Possibly this may help us to see how the great evil just mentioned could exist without producing distrust of the law. What are the cases which fill the reports of your Johnson, Cowen and Wendell, all but matchless in American jurisprudence? Certainly not the cases of corporations, merchant princes, railway kings, rather the smaller cases of the people. It was the good fortune of the judges of the first half of the nineteenth century to have to settle the great principles of the law in the small suits of the people. You will look in vain in the later reports for beautiful decisions touching promissory notes, or trespass, or conversion, or any of a score of subjects, in which broad general doctrines are worked out and established. And the decisions of your courts were on the whole so sound and sensible that there was small reason for complaint. The people believed in your laws, for they saw that they were good. Things were done, not all at once, but in the end, on a large scale; and the process could be seen and followed by any one of fair intelligence. There was a time, I verily believe, when the people of New York, like their English forefathers long ago, would have declared with a ring in the words, "We will not that the laws of New York should be changed." Will any one here say that that time is now, that it is now as it was in the days of Kent, and Walworth, and Bronson, and Denio? Sir, the people of New York to-day are indifferent to your laws; the people of Massachusetts to-day are indifferent to her laws; the people of the great Commonwealth which includes us all are indifferent to the body of her laws. But let me not be misunderstood. I am not saying that you have not had great judges in the more recent times; I am far from saying that you have not an able and a fearless judiciary now. You have passed through a perilous experiment thus far without serious reason to regret having tried it, though I fear that you may not feel the full force of your responsibility for the example set before States not so well prepared for an elective judiciary. What I meant to suggest was, that your courts are no longer occupied as they formerly were with the litigations of the great body of your people, your yeomanry, and that your courts are forestalled of the privilege of settling broad doctrines of law. Your courts are crowded with the litigation of "trusts," so called, with the contentions of a hundred great corporations, with the disputes of your millionaires; the people are not there. Of course I mean relatively; the smaller causes are overshadowed by those of capital. Participation in legislative jobbery, to return, is of course divided; the profession is seldom in the majority in the Legislature or on the committees in which the most mischief is hatched. But the point which I am now euforcing is the reality, the nature and the extent of the waning respect for the law, not the proper distribution of blame. Let us pass on to other illustrations. Who is the bright man on the street, with admirers high and low? Is it not with too many the man who has exploited some scheme by which he has succeeded in evading the law, and made or saved a snug sum? I heard of a man not long ago who went through bankruptcy, whe when taxed with driving the same fine turnout afterward as before, and asked if he had not just gone through bankruptcy, had the ready answer, "Oh, yes, I went through bankruptcy, but the horses and car riages, you know, were just driven around it." And how many there are to applaud! Nor let any one suppose that it is merely the wit of the rogue that is applauded; the best of men enjoy a touch of wit, even though there be a flavor of the profane in it, if the flavor is not coarse. The serious part of the matter is that the act, not the wit alone, is thought lightly of; thought lightly of because it is only evasion of the law, the law being looked upon much as the sailor looks upon a bank of fog lying across his course. A. would not cheat B.; A. would not lie to B. to get away B.'s money, but what part that unknown and dangerous quantity called the law may play in affairs A. knows not, and if it lies in his way, or in the way of his friends, he treats it, or is not disturbed when they treat it, as a baleful thing, to be escaped if possible; if not, to be suffered. He does indeed invoke the aid of the law in time of need, but respect born of fear is little worth. cess. The worst perhaps remains to be said, or rather confessed, for thus far the profession has at most only shared with the rest of the world in the lowering proBut I fear that we must confess that a part of the profession is tugging away at the very pillars of the temple, not purposely, but like blind Samson tugging still. I trust that no one will charge me with sanctimoniousness. It is right for counsel to stand by their clients to the last, but it is immoral to stir up strife, it is degrading and immoral for a lawyer to do so for money. I presume that you of New York are no better or worse than we of Massachusetts, and that what the better part of the bar of New England sees and laments, you see and lament. Stirring up strife! Why, sir, if a man is run over in the street his household will do well to barricade his doors. Against reporters of the press? I wish that were all. Not against the reporters so much, whose business has some justification, and at the worst is not directly prompted by selfish motives, the doors must be barred against the press of men whom our books have taught us to call officers of the court-men of law urging, contending, eager to make spoil where perchance spoil there is none. Men and brethren, if those most intimately concerned with the administration of law play an ignoble part, how long will the rest of the world respect the temple of justice? I shall not be misunderstood in this place. It is but a small part of the profession that will condescend to such methods, but the evil which a few men may do is often incalculable. I have said enough in regard to the reality, the nature and the extent of the evil which is the subject of my address, and I have said nothing new. Let us be thankful that there is nothing new to be said on that part of our subject, that the evil does not lurk in se |