view would help to achieve. this end more than the enforced sobriety of the labourers. With their men sober seven days in the week, they claimed that America would lead the world in industrial production. as she led it in the scale of wages paid. Accepting the correctness of this explanation, then, we are to understand that nation-wide Prohibition would never have become fait accompli but for the action of the great industrial corporations of the United States. It is fairly obvious from the failure of success in enforcing the law throughout the country that Prohibition was not brought about by the moral enthusiasm of the people as a whole or of any large number of them. To be convinced that up to the present time at least it is correct to say that Prohibition does not prohibit one has only to read the daily press of America. The greatest scandal of it all is that officers appointed to enforce the law are intrigued with its professional violators. Facts illustrative of this as a widespread condition are coming to light every day. And that is not all. Taking up a newspaper at the moment we are informed that Mr. Harnett, Commissioner of Motor Vehicles for New York, reports that in the Metropolitan District drunkenness was the chief cause of the recent sweeping revocation and suspension of licenses issued to drivers of motor vehicles. Then attention is also presently drawn to the bold defiance of the law by the smart set-numbering doubtless many of the industrial magnates who "put Prohibition over "-which has moved District Attorney Buckner to close up many of the fashionable cafés and restaurants in New York City. Mr. Buckner's "pad-locks" serve to remind us of Euripides and his story of Pentheus who locked up Dionysus, the god of wine, in a stable with a view to banishing his orgiastic worship from Greece. While we are not persuaded that great things for Prohibition will result from the District Attorney's intensive campaign we trust that he will escape at the hands of our modern bacchae the dreadful fate that overtook Pentheus.

The great diversity of opinion in the minds of the best of people makes the question one of the most difficult of social problems. We have met with a most vigorously defended thesis that as much the larger part of human life consists of tedium varied by positive pain our life must be allowed a little edge of ecstacy, such as alcoholic beverages readily yield, or it is not worth the living. But how absurd to expect the "hundred per cent. American" who is extreme in all his ways to be content with "a little edge of ecstacy"! We are handsomely supported in this view by the following commentary recently published by an American citizen on the potatory manners of Frenchmen as contrasted with those of the writer's own countrymen: "A Frenchman sits down at a table on the

boulevard with a single small glass of light wine; and sips, and rolls it under his tongue; and sips, and studies a cloud in the sky; and sips, and holds the glass up to the light; and sips, and looks at the river, and quotes a couple of verses of Ronsard; and sips, and considers what he was doing in April a year ago; and lifts the glass, and puts it down and counts his change; and so on for half an hour or an hour; while the Yankee traveller at the next table selects a bottle of the most expensive wine on the list, gulps it down like ice-water, and sighs for a good American cocktail. We were born whiskey-drinkers, high and low, men and women." Hence he concludes that the interests of the nation as a whole demand the continuance of Prohibition, and that its enforcement will gradually become honest and effective. All of which we commend to our readers who are interested in solving the question of Prohibition as a social means of grace.

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DRUNKENNESS IN CANADA.-Having discussed the confessed appentency of our American cousins for strong drink so frankly, it would seem to be for our admonition that before the ink was dry on what we had written above we were reminded by a perusal of the opinion of the Chief Justice of Canada in The King v. Eastern Terminal Elevator Company (The Grain Act Case), that our own fair country has been solemnly adjudged to be even in worse case at one time than the United States concerning the evil of intemperance. It seems by the explication of Lord Haldane in the Lemieux Act case1 we are to understand that the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council held the opinion that in 1878, when Canada had but entered upon her second decade of national life, the slavery of her citizens to John Barleycorn was so great that Parliament had to enact the Canada Temperance Act, popularly known as the "Scott Act," in order to protect the young nation from "disaster "-that is the word used by Lord Haldane, and it is of unpleasant import indeed. Yet one halts in his indignation to reflect how inadequately the national "disaster" would have been averted by local option legislation!

Chief Justice Anglin's observations on Lord Haldane's reading of the opinion of the Judicial Committee in Russell v. The Queen are so direct and clear that we have only to quote them in order to inform our readers fully upon the whole matter:—

"In alluding to the Lemieux Act judgment I feel that I should respectively take exception to the suggestion there made that the 'Toronto Electric Commissioners v. Snider, [1925] A.C. 396.

Board which decided Russell v. The Queen must be considered to have had before their minds an emergency putting the national life. of Canada in unanticipated peril (p. 416) as the occasion of the enactment by Parliament of the Canada Temperance Act, 1878. Referring to this supposed emergency his Lordship says, at p. 412: "Their Lordships think that the decision in Russell v. The Queen can only be supported to-day, not on the footing of having laid down an interpretation, such as has sometimes been invoked of the general words at the beginning of s. 91, but on the assumption of the Board, apparently made at the time of deciding the case of Russell v. The Queen, that the evil of intemperance at that time amounted in Canada to one so great and so general that at least for the period it was a menace to the national life of Canada so serious and pressing that the National Parliament was called on to intervene to protect the nation from disaster. An epidemic or pestilence might conceivably have been regarded as analogous.'

"I cannot find anything in the judgment delivered by Sir Montague E. Smith in the Russell case suggestive of such a view having been entertained by the Judicial Committee. On the contrary, the whole tenor of the judgment seems to me inconsistent with its having proceeded on that basis. I should indeed be surprised if a body so well informed as their Lordships had countenanced such an aspersion on the fair fame of Canada even though some hard driven advocate had ventured to insinuate it in argument."

We congratulate the learned Chief Justice of Canada on his moderate and courteously worded but withal intrepid defence of the character of the Canadian people at the time in question. While it is a truth of history that sensitiveness to criticism or reproof is temperamental in a nation as well as in an individual during the period of adolescence, yet so grave an imputation as the one in question would be vulnus immedicabile if founded in fact and justice demands. that it should be challenged if it has no such foundation. It is common knowledge that long before the passage of the "Scott Act " addiction to strong drink was viewed as a disgrace and a bar to commercial or professional preferment in the more populous centres of Canada; while in the rural districts where Puritanism had its chief hold it was actually looked upon as a crime. The zealot was abroad, and the air was vibrant with his propaganda. In the pulpit and on the lecture platform total abstinence from beverages containing "C, H, OH" was placed in the same category of obligation as chastity. Moreover, the advocate of teetotalism was never so effective

19-C.B.R.-VOL. III.

with his audience as when he pictured the degradation of men and women in the "pubs " of England and Scotland at the time, and expressed the fear that the New World might become as bad through immigration! Old Roger Ascham said that he found as much liberty to sin in six days in Italy as he did in six months in England; and that about states the liquor situation in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as between the Old Country and Canada.

We are interested to find one of our valued contributors taking a different view from that of the Chief Justice concerning Lord Haldane's remarks in the Lemieux Act case--but autant de têtes, autant d'avis! What he has to say upon the question will be found in the department of "Notes" in this number of the REVIEW.

THE LATE A. E. RANDALL.-We regret to record the death of Mr. A. E. Randall, editor of the Law Quarterly Review, which took place suddenly in England last month. When Mr. Randall was chosen to succeed Sir Frederick Pollock on the latter's retirement from the editorship in 1919 the choice in itself was a fine tribute to his talents and scholarship, for the Law Quarterly Review is easily in the van of legal periodicals in the English speaking world. The standard set by the original editor for acceptable articles was maintained by Mr. Randall during his four years of office; and as a result there was no falling off in the high quality of the contents of the publication. Mr. Randall is also favourably known to the profession by reason of his editions of Leake's works on Contracts and on Real Property law. It were probably fantastic to apply to the editor of a publication devoted to the interests of one particular class in the community the lyrical appraisement of Carlyle: "Is not every able editor a ruler of the world, being a persuader of it?" Yet the streams that pervade the literature of the law find their source in the beginnings of civilisation, one of the first things ever edited being a code which ushered in the reign of law.

NEGLIGENCE BY MEDICAL PRACTITIONERS.-In the recent English case of Gray, et ux. v. Peacock, an action by a husband and wife claiming damages from a doctor for alleged negligence in treating female plaintiff, the wife, during confinement, Lord Chief Justice Hewart, in summing up to the jury, observed that a doctor did not guarantee results, but when he held himself out to practice medicine and surgery he undertook that he had a reasonable and competent measure of skill and that he would use reasonable care. A barrister,

a poet, a statesman or a dignitary of the Church who by negligent conduct, imperilled the fortune of a case, the taste of the public, the interests of the nation or the future of an immortal soul, was not liable for damages. What retribution eventually awaited him did not involve him in any such liability. Doctors, however, like chauffeurs, engine drivers and solicitors, were in another group and were bound at their peril to use reasonable care. The only question for the jury was whether or not Dr. P. was justified in using forceps and whether Mrs. Gray's injuries resulted from the use of these instruments. The jury returned verdict for defendant, and judgment was entered accordingly on the claim and counterclaim with costs.

*

A. MACM.

THOMAS D'ARCY MCGEE.-In the comprehensive and well written. "Life of Thomas D'Arcy McGee " by Mrs. O. D. Skelton, which has just appeared, we are told that McGee was called to the Bar, and that he appeared as counsel at a murder trial held in Montreal in April, 1862. In those happy days of moist exuberance, when reasonable men generally agreed with the old squaw who remarked to Sir John Macdonald that "too much was just enough," it was not unusual for a statesman to be called to the Bar frequently, but it will probably be news to many to learn that McGee practised there.

The same volume gives an account of the proceedings against the leaders of the Young Ireland party in 1848 under the Treason-Felony bill, and the trial of John Mitchell. The presiding judge at that trial was Baron Lefroy, whose son General Sir J. H. Lefroy, K.C.M.G. became Governor successively of Tasmania and Bermuda, and whose name has been perpetuated in Canada by Mount Lefroy, a peak in the Canadian Rockies which was called after him. The General's son was Mr. A. H. F. Lefroy, K.C., author of "Canada's Federal System," and for some years professor of Roman law and jurisprudence in Toronto University. Mr. Lefroy's mother was a daughter of Sir John Beverley Robinson, Chief Justice of Upper Canada, so that he inherited a good legal strain on both sides of the house.

R. W. S.

The following paragraph appeared not long ago in one of the Toronto daily papers:

"In the Iris of the eye, asserts Dr. Leon Vennier, are written all the ills to which flesh is heir. His method of 'iriscopia' is an infallible one, he insists, for diagnosis. For, he explains, the iris