By Irving Browne.
CURRENT TOPICS. S1r Frank Lockwood. — It appears, from Mr. Augustine Birrell's biography of this lamented law yer, that there never was a professional personality so attractive and familiar about whom it was more difficult to set down much in print. The volume has not yet come to our hands, but from the London " Law Journal " we reproduce two charming extracts : — "It was on a petition to the Master of the Rolls for payment out of Court of a sum of money; and Lockwood appeared for an official liquidator of a company whose con sent had to be obtained before the Court would part with the fund. Lockwood was instructed to consent, and his reward was to be three guineas on the brief and one guinea for consultation. The petition came on in due course be fore Lord Romilly, and was made plain to him by counsel for the petitioner, and still a little plainer by counsel for the principal respondent. Then up rose Lockwood, an imposing figure, and indicated his appearance in the case. 'What brings you here?' said Lord Romilly, meaning, I presume, ' Why need I listen to you? ' Lockwood looking puzzled, Lord Romilly added, a little testily, 'What do you come here for? ' The answer was immediate, unexpected, and, accompanied as it was by a dramatic glance at the out side of his brief, as if to refresh his memory, triumphant, 'Three and one, my lord.' There was Homeric laughter in the old Court of Chancery, and it was fitting there should be, for this was not only Lockwood's first brief and first forensic joke, but it was, I verily believe, the last joke ever made in the High Court of Chancery." This indicates that Sir Frank Lockwood had even more courage than Erskine on his first appearance in court, for a lawyer who could utter a jest in the Court of Chancery must indeed have been armed in triple brass, as well as in triple gold. The next shows the ruling humor strong in death : — "We learn that Lord Halsbury viewed Lockwood's suc cession to the Bench with an eye of partiality, and that he paid him a visit while he lay ill in Lennox Gardens. Re ferring to this friendly call, the dying advocate, glancing at his shrunken form, said, ' The Chancellor must have felt I should make an excellent puisne judge.'" Sir Frank must have been a model M. P., for "during the twelve years he represented York in the House of Commons he spoke only fifty times, and Mr. Birrell tells us that ' all his fifty speeches rolled
into one would hardly make up a single parliament ary oration of the full-bodied, long-winded, front bench order.'" Vot1ng by Mach1nery. — Nearly every industry has been reduced to operation by machinery — even voting. But a good deal of question as to the consti tutionality of this process has been made, and in the last volume of Rhode Island reports is the answer of that court to the official inquiry of the governor on that subject, in the affirmative, one judge dissenting. The machine in question is known as the " McTammany machine" — significant name, both in the pre fix and the principal part. It is operated by pushing a button, which makes a hole in a roll of paper in visible to the voter. The majority of the judges deemed this equivalent to a pencil-mark. But one dissented, observing: "It is common knowledge that human machines and mechanisms get out of order, and fail to work, in all sorts of unforeseen ways. Ordinarily the person using a machine can see a result. Thus a bank clerk, perforating a check with figures, sees the holes; an officer of the law, using a gibbet by pressing a button, sees the result accomplished that he sought; and so on ad infini tum. But a voter on this voting machine has no knowledge, through his senses, that he has accom plished a result. The most that can be said is, that iflhe machine worked as intended, then he has made his hole and voted." The short answer to this is, that if he didn't make his hole he didn't vote — just as if his pencil failed to make a ma1k, although he thought it did. The Decay of Courtesy. — In referring to a re cent paragraph on this subject, in this department, a correspondent calls attention to the fact that, in Judge Dillon's excellent " Laws and Jurisprudence of Eng land and America," that writer shows how it came about that Mississippi was the first State to pass an act for the relief of married women in respect to their property rights. Quoting from an address to the Bar Association of that State, by Mr. R. H. Thomp son, its president, he states that " the sources of Mississippi's first married women's law were the tribal customs of the Chickasaw Indians, then residing in
