The English Law Courts. Stone he could think of no better name for his brewery than ' Stone Brewery,' he could find no more fitting designation for his ales than ' Stone Ales '; then came these pro ceedings. It is not the first time in these cases that water has got an honest man into trouble and failed him at a pinch." In dis cussing the question whether the Court of Appeal (whose order was ultimately af firmed) ought not to have restrained Mont gomery simply from using the term Stone Ale without clearly distinguishing his ales from those of the Thompsons, Lord MacNaghten said : " Any attempt to distinguish the two, even if honestly made, would have been per fectly idle. Thirsty folk want beer, not ex planation." To Lord Watson's unique po sition we have referred in a previous paper. It only remains to allude to Lord Hannen and Lord Bowen, whose deaths, the former after a long career of judicial and public ser vice, the latter before the promise of his brilliant life had been fulfilled, have per ceptibly impoverished the judicature of England. The biographies of both of these great men are familiar to our readers, and we need not reproduce them here. As types, different indeed but equally great and strik ing, of all that is best in the English legal world, they have rarely been excelled. In strength of character Lord Hannen sur passed Lord Bowen. In scholarship, in culture, in brilliancy, and subtlety of intellect, Lord Bowen surpassed Lord Hannen. In power of exposition, in patience, in true courtesy and kindness, in the modesty of greatness, he would be a bold critic that ventured to differentiate them. No one in this nineteenth century more truly deserved the seventeenth century title of "admirable" than Lord Bowen. At Rugby and at Oxford he was famous alike in athletics and in learning. The highest honors in classical
341
scholarship fell to his lot. At the bar he succeeded in overthrowing the law laid down by the Queen's Bench Division in Clewer's case. On the bench he delivered judgments which, in point of ingenuity and logical and rhetorical power, are not equaled by any thing that appears in the law reports. We have heard the voice of Lord Bramwell in the Mogul Steamship case. Let me close with the wisdom of Lord Bowen in the same great cause. " All commercial men with capital are acquainted with the ordinary ex pedient of sowing one year a crop of appar ently unfruitful prices, in order, by driving competition away, to reap a fuller harvest of profit in the future; and until the present argument at the bar, it may be doubted whether shipowners or merchants were ever deemed to be bound by law to conform to some imaginary normal standard of freights or prices, or that law courts had a right to say to them, in respect of their competitive tariffs, Thus far shalt thou go and no fur ther. To attempt to limit English com petition in this way would probably be as hopeless an endeavor as the experiment of King Canute. But on ordinary principles of law no such fettered unfreedom of trade can, in my opinion, be warranted. The sub stance of my view is this, that competition, however severe and egotistical, if unattended by circumstances of dishonesty, intimida tion, or molestation, gives rise to no cause of action at common law. I myself should deem it a misfortune if we were to attempt to present to the business world how honest and peaceable trade was to be carried on, in a case where no such illegal elements as I have mentioned exist, or were to adopt some standard of judicial ' reasonableness,' or of ' normal ' prices or ' fair freights ' to which commercial adventurers otherwise innocent were bound to conform. Lex.
