— especially where her object was merely to enable him to obtain her money for the accomplishment of the great plans for mankind which he claimed to have conceived, and the marriage is brought about in pur suance of his fraudulent scheme to obtain her money. The influences in this case were spiritual communi cations from her dead husband's ghost, through the "mejum" of the defendant. One of the old lady's foolish acts was to build a hall at a place dictated by the " sperit." Another was to import an attorney from Washington and pay him five hundred dollars to col lect a claim against a perfectly solvent estate, her own resident attorney having refused her offer to the same effect. (The name of this honest attorney ought to be given.) Another was to contract this second marriage contrary to all her original resolutions, " be lieving that she had found one who espoused the doc trine so near to her heart, and who could revolutionize the world, eliminate misery and sorrow from the con ditions of men, and as it were make earth a paradise." Another was to publish a book of communications from the spirit world to the Son of Wisdom," meaning Orchardson, entitled " The Light of the Ages and Deathblow to Poverty," dedicated to her, and containing flattering allusions to her. He also got a will out of her in his favor. This able financier re minds one of Home, who ran such a career in Eng land, and this old woman of that one from whom he got three hundred thousand dollars by similar means.
Cheating at Horse- Racing. — The recent case in Montana, of Morrison v. Bennett, 40 L. R. A. 158, is to the effect that a partnership for horse rac ing on a bet with a person whom the partners regard as a " sucker," and a " big snap," into which they in duce him to enter by making him think he had a sure thing and by deceiving him into the supposition that their horse was untrained and undeveloped, while they deemed that they had a "dead mortal cinch," is such a conspiracy to defraud, that a court will not aid either of the partners by compelling one who has pocketed all the profits to make an accounting. The court seem to take judicial notice of the slang words above quoted. They failed to quote one queer term of the conspiracy — "this is no josh." What this means is not apparent — probably a reference to the old prophet. The court would not go so far as to ad mit that it disapproved of honest horse-racing merely because worldly men bet on it. They were careful preliminarily to write themselves down to that effect. But they strongly disapproved of lending the aid of the court to effect a division of the spoils between the conspirators. They observed : — "Men who associate themselves for the purpose of cheating others cannot ask the court to distribute their
booty by adjudging the demands of one against the other, arising out of their quarrels over their plunder." And quoting from Jessel M. R., in Sykes v. Beadon, L. R. n Chan. 170: "The notion that because a transaction which is illegal is closed, that therefore a court of equity is to interfere in dividing the proceeds of the illegal transaction, is not only opposed to princi ple, but to authority, — to authority in the well-known case of the highwaymen, where a robbery had been committed, and one highwayman unsuccessfully sued the other for a division of the proceeds of the robbery." "If two persons go partners as smugglers, can one maintain a bill against the other to have an account of the smuggling transaction? I should say certainly not. It is not sufficent to say that the transaction is concluded as a reason for the interference of the court. If that were the reason, it would be lending the aid of the court to assert the rights of the parties in carryout and completing an illegal contract. If the part nership is for the purpose of smuggling, that is an illegal contract, and the court cannot maintain it, and the court will not lend its aid at all to it." " It is no part of the duty of a court of justice to aid either in carrying out an illegal contract, or in dividing the proceeds arising from an illegal contract, between the parties to that illegal contract. In my opinion, no action can be maintained for the one purpose more than for the other." Good old Chief-Justice Wilmot uttered very sound counsel on this point in Collins v. Blantern, 2 Wils. 341 : " You shall not stipulate for iniquity. All writers upon our law agree in this, no polluted hand shall touch the pure fountains of justice. Whoever is a party to an unlawful contract, if he hath once paid the money stipulated to be paid in pursuance thereof, he shall not has'e the help of a court to fetch it back again; you shall not have a right of action when you come into a court of justice in this unclean manner to recover it back! Procul, O, procul, este profani! " That Latin settled it. In the principal case the party proposing the job wrote to the other: "We will not stand on any small things in our deal with you. Expect you to share the harvest with us," etc. To this the court relegated the sufferer observ ing : " Plaintiffs are entitled to little sympathy. They knowingly entered into the contract, and are only suf fering the consequences of a dishonest transaction in which they united, and which they proved in present ing their case. The fault of the parties being mutual, they can only rely for shares of profits upon those sentiments of honor which one of them wrote would exist when they entered into their immoral combi nation. Being in pari delicto, we apply the maxim, Potior est conditio possidentis." How polite the court was! Why " little sympathy "? We should say none whatever.
