Libby v. Tobey, 82 Maine, 397, recalls the era of mining companies in Maine, f1fteen years ago, when a new Eldorado dawned upon the vision of every owner of a sheep-pasture or other rocky spot of land or ledge. In eastern Maine, Blue Hill, Sul livan, Gouldsborough and Deer Isle were found to possess veins and deposits of copper and silver, and active operations in mining were begun and carried on. Corporations with capital running into many thousand dollars were formed under the State law, and shares of stock could be found in the hands of nearly everybody. Speculation in mineral rights ran rife, and fortunes (on paper) were easily made. When the bubble burst and investors found their fortunes had vanished like a vision in the night, and melted like a palace of snow, there arose the troublesome question of their liabilities as stockholders to creditors who had ob tained judgments against these corporations and were seeking to enforce them against individual stockholders. This question was a difficult and perplexing one to the legal fraternity because it had become complicated by changes in the statute from time to time. In the case cited, it received at the hands of Judge Foster a careful consideration, and the conclusions which he arrived at are so clearly demonstrated and the result so satis factory that his opinion has become the settled law of the State. He holds that the individual liability of the stockholders for the debts of the corporation is created solely by statute, and it is to be strictly construed as between the shareholder and creditor, since there is, at common law, no contract, express or implied, between them. As an interpretation and judicial construction of corporation law, the opinion contains the decisions of other cognate and collateral questions which arose for determination in the case. In the same volume, at page 472, will be found his opinion in the case of State v. Stain and Cromwell, most carefully consid
ered, and concurred in by every member of the court. The unbiased reader will find here the true and real merits of the trial of the murderers of treasurer Barron, stated and discussed in a convincing manner. The respondents were convicted upon two classes of evidence, confessions and their identifi cation and presence at Dexter on two pre vious occasions the year before, and in and about the bank building on the day when the murder was committed. Of these two classes of evidence examined and weighed by Judge Foster with his well-known and pains-taking care, he says : "... While not in any sense dependent upon each other, [they] are nevertheless in a most remarkable and striking degree in all their essential par ticulars entirely consistent, and in harmony with each other." The case is notable from the fact that ten years had elapsed after the crime before the murderers were convicted, and in the meantime the theory of suicide had taken possession of the minds of people in the town of Dexter, where the crime was com mitted,—a thing still persisted in by some, al though proven to be unsustained by the facts. Recent attempts to procure a pardon of the convicts has reopened a discussion of the case, and in this connection one recalls the remark of Wilkie Collins in his " Rogue's Life," that the person who first gets his ver sion of an affair out upon the public will generally be believed. It was in this man ner, through the press, that one of the coun sel who defended these men conducted his defense both before and during the progress of the case. The public mind was thus preoccupied before it even knew what the testimony of the State was. In Bulger v. Eden, 82 Maine, 352, will be found an interesting comparison of au thorities bearing upon the frequent contests in the court over the liabilities of municipal corporations for the torts or negligent acts of their officers. The opinion clearly de fines the well-known distinction which exists between their acts as public officers, on the
