tal and labor. A father sent his three sons into the world to seek their fortunes. When years had elapsed they met in a far off land thousands of miles from their old home. One said he had discovered a medicine which would cure any disease; another that he had found a carpet upon which, if one stood and wished, it would carry him whereever he pleased; the third, that he had discovered a glass by which he could see any object in the world. The one with the glass raised it and saw his father in a dying condition. The three brothers stood on the carpet and they were carried immediately to the sick father. The medicine was administered and the father was instantly cured. They fell to disputing among themselves as to who had saved the father. The wise old man said three things saved him; the glass that had discovered him, the carpet that had carried them to him, and the medicine that had cured him, and without all three he would have died.

So it is with advertising. Capital alone is not the cause of the commercial supremacy of our country; labor alone has not caused it; labor and capital together have not caused it; but the commercial greatness of our country is due to three great factors, capital, labor and advertising.

Practical Suggestions on Codifying

the Law of Warehouse
Receipts.

(An address delivered before the American Warehousemen's Association, at the New Willard Hotel, Washington, D. C., December 8, 1904.)

Mr. President and Gentlemen

Of one hundred and sixty national commercial organizations in the United States, the American Bankers' Association and the American Warehousemen's Association have manifested the deepest interest and co-operation in improving the commercial law and making it uniform. It will be superfluous to discuss the wisdom of and necessity for codifying the law of warehouse receipts and making that law uniform throughout the United States, because the American Warehousemen's Association has already placed itself on record on these questions and appropriated fifteen hundred dollars and The Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws has employed Mr. Barry Mohun of the Washington bar and Professor Samuel Williston of Harvard Law School to do the work. It remains to make a few practical suggestions on framing and perfecting this code.

The proposed code governing warehouse receipts is a commercial code and therefore ought to be based on the mercantile rather than the legal view, where a conflict exists. A brief sketch of the growth of mercantile law may aid in a solution of this question. England, from whom we derive our traditions, is and always has been a commercial nation. King Alfred, who reigned at the end of the ninth century, passed laws permitting foreign merchants to visit his kingdom for purposes of trade during the great fairs. The Norman Kings made unfulfilled promises to their subjects that King Edward's Code of Saxon law should receive the royal sanction, and about the year eleven hundred Henry the First granted a charter of liberties. On June 15, 1215, King John signed Magna Charta, which guaranteed a right to international trade as follows: "All merchants shall have safety and security in coming into England, and going out of England, and in staying and traveling through England, as well by land as by water, to buy and sell, without any unjust exactions, according to ancient and right customs." To the consistent fulfilment of this declaration, England owes her commercial supremacy for seven hundred years. The foreign merchants added to these "ancient and right customs" commercial usages of the continent on many

subjects. The merchants at each great fair instituted a Court Pepoudrous, or Dusty-foot Court, so called, because disputes were there settled as quickly as "the dust fell from the feet," and there administered justice according to these customs. By the beginning of the seventeenth century the custom of merchants was admitted as evidence in the courts in cases of trade contracts, and by the middle of the eighteenth century business had so increased that the usages of merchants were recognized in courts as part of the common law. The struggle was a long one; foreign bills of exchange first received judicial sanction; domestic bills next fell under judicial sway, but promissory notes were slow to find a place in the law. Lord Chief Justice Holt, in the year seventeen hundred and three, ruled in the case of Clerke v. Martin1 that a promissory note was not negotiable, and declared that the merchants were endeavoring to set the law of Lombard Street above the law of Westminster Hall. The merchants, however, successfully appealed to Parliament, and Lombard Street did make law for Westminster Hall. This act was passed in the year seventeen hundred and four, and is known as the statute of 3 and 4 Anne, chapter nine, and has been re-enacted in most of the American States.

12 Raym. Ld., 757.

Mercantile usages as to checks, bonds, certificates of stock, scrip, warehouse receipts and bills of lading have found judicial recognition. Mercantile usages as to the relation of partners, principal and agent, bailor and bailee and other commercial transactions have also received judicial approval.

Many judges of many courts have at times refused to recognize mercantile usages in their purity, and declined to give them full force. The Supreme Court of Massachusetts, on the third day of April, 1883, in the case of Hallgarten v. Oldham, declared that a warehouse receipt issued by the owner of a private warehouse to a third person by name and not to his order and by him assigned did not transfer title. Mr. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, in deciding that case said: "The appeal to commercial usage cannot help the plaintiff's case. If there be any usage to treat such documents as this as symbols of property in the sense of the argument of the plaintiffs, it is simply a usage to disregard well settled rules of law affecting the rights of third persons.

The merchants gave to the law their customs and usages. The courts have been slow, at times, to give these customs and usages the full force of law. Now, however, that our legislative bodies are to give back to the merchants codes of mercantile

2135 Mass., 1.