THE CANADIAN BAR

REVIEW

THE CANADIAN BAR REVIEW is the organ of the Canadian Bar Association, and it is felt that its pages should be open to free and fair discussion of all matters of interest to the legal profession in Canada. The Editor, however, wishes it to be understood that opinions expressed in signed articles are those of the individual writers only, and that the REVIEW does not assume any responsibility for such opinions.

It is hoped that members of the profession will favour the Editor from time to time with notes of important cases determined by the Courts in which they practice.

All articles intended for publication must be typed before being sent to the Editor at 44 McLeod Street, Ottawa.

CANADIAN BAR ASSOCIATION.

GREETINGS FROM THE PRESIDENT.

I have been asked by the Editor of the CANADIAN BAR REVIEW, the journal that is proving so attractive and beneficial to us all, for a New Year's message to the Association. So many presidential messages have been delivered by me that I cannot think of them otherwise than as "stalemate" in both form and material. But I must do as I am directed. Yet I will depart sufficiently to express, on behalf of the Association, our thanks to Dr. Morse and those assisting in the literary work of the REVIEW, as well as to its managing Committee; and to extend to them all our cordial wishes. and promise of support for the REVIEW during the year 1924.

Most sincerely do I wish the members of the Canadian Bar Association a happy New Year, full of useful activity and achieveinent.

Gone is the year 1923 with its joys and service, with its victories and defeats, with its mistakes and escapes, with its upset plans and unwise ambitions, with its useless fears and unworthy worries. Its record is made up and filed. Is it not prudence for one entering the New Year to gather up all his resentments, his memories of ingratitude, his enmities poisonous to life, and engulf them all in deep oblivion? Is it not wisdom to remember only whatever was

worth while and good, and nothing of the ill save for the purpose of caution and guidance? So will one be freer from many impediments and better equipped for the advance into 1924.

To the OLD YEAR, farewell! All hail to the NEW!

At the very outset we are confronted with the overhang of the past; the same old struggle for respectable existence in a time of economic depression and for maintaining and educating the family. We are facing the old problem of keeping efficient in intellect, in spirit, in bodily vigour, and in poise, of so dealing with and caring for clients that they will be satisfied with our conduct of their affairs and pay adequately and cheerfully as they should for the services faithfully rendered. The value of that fidelity cannot be estimated in dollars.

Then there are aims to be attained and difficulties to be overcome which, while requiring individual effort, need also massed action from the Profession. Ours is the duty of upholding and improving our political, social and economic order against the evil-minded and subtle intrusion of elements of Bolshevism, red communism-breeders of disrespect for law-laying a base for revolution and the violent overthrow of settled government. Think of all this

"As a serpent's egg,

Which hatch'd, would as his kind, grow mischievous;

And kill him in the shell."

Then there are the objects of our Association which should be kept ever in our minds, splendid ascents to be climbed, great purposes to be accomplished but not without difficulty and continuous effort.

All these are age-old problems, solved at times in the past, but are ever new and to be re-solved now. With the New Year let us approach them with a new spirit, interpret them in a new light, treat 1924 and all that we will meet in it as a great adventure requiring alertness, patience, pluck and spiritual enthusiasm and in which there will be the exhilaration of conflict and overcoming.

In his Cole lectures Fosdick says:

"For men live by love and joy and hope and faith and spiritual insight. When these things vanish life is

'a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing." "

J. A. M. AIKINS.

With the number published in December the REVIEW completed its first volume. Glancing over the Index of matter printed during the year, we cannot but feel gratified at the response the profession in Canada has made to the request contained in our Salutatory for special articles. Thanks to our contributors the REVIEW has already proved itself worth while as the organ of the Canadian Bar Association. There are, however, certain improvements and extensions needed to bring the publication up to the standard envisaged by the Editorial Board at the inception of the undertaking. But we are confident that the second volume of the REVIEW will mark a very distinct advance upon the measure of achievement vouchsafed to the first.

*

We stopped the presses last month in order to announce that an arrangement had been arrived at between the Canadian Pacific Railway Company and the Canadian Bar Association whereby those who desire to attend the meeting of the American and Canadian Bar Association in London next summer may obtain accommodation on the "Montlaurier," sailing from Quebec on the 8th July. We were glad to do this, and we shall not apologize for keeping the event before our readers so long as there is time for them to take part in it. The rate of $135 from Montreal to Southampton is so reasonable that our Association should be well represented. The meeting cannot fail to write itself into a chapter of history. For England and America it will be a time of forgetting of the mistakes and misunderstandings of three centuries. A distracted Europe may take hope from a spectacle of the people of the greatest Englishspeaking community overseas visiting the ancestral home of their language and laws in token of kinship and goodwill. That the outgoing of the Pilgrim Fathers from Plymouth Sound in 1620 was not allowed to become a dispersion seems to disclose a design of Providence to raise up a nation in the New World that would, when the time was ripe, use its power for the healing of the nations in the Old World; and this returning of their inheritors may be regarded as the end of an odyssey rich in experiences making for the consummation of that purpose. For Canadians all it will be an opportunity to play the pleasant part of accessory before the fact in a joyful killing of the Ancient Grudge.

Speaking of the resignation from the King's Bench Division of the Right Honourable Sir Charles Darling, after some twenty-six years of service as a Judge, one of the best-known legal periodicals in England said: "Possessed of shrewd common sense and astute intel

lect, in some respects he may be said to have justified his appointment. But it was rather as a jester than as a judge (italics ours) he attracted public attention, and we are afraid that it is chiefly in the former rôle he will be remembered." This is plain speaking, indeed, especially when the subject of the appreciation still has ears to hear. It is not comforting to one who considerately retires from active service when he feels that his best work has been done to learn that his robe of reputation is but scanty attire against the chill of oblivion. We think our contemporary should have done better by Mr. Justice Darling. It would have been well to remember what Lord Hewart, C.J., said of the retiring Judge: "It has been his happy fortune to demonstrate here, day by day, to all concerned, that in order to be wise it is not necessary to be dull, and that in order to interpret the law it is not necessary to turn your back upon literature." At nisi prius Sir Charles Darling was a most useful judge. In criminal cases he never failed to vindicate the affinity between justice and law. If his judicial jokes were not always judicious, at least his "Scintilla Juris" and "Meditations in the Tea Room" furnish adequate proof that if he is not a "lord of irony that master spell" in literature, he has at least a very pretty talent for satire.

We shudder to think of the opprobrium that were ours should we venture to speak of a Canadian Judge on his retirement as one who had. made his official career principally that of a Court jester; but voluntary retirements from the Bench in this country are so rare as to render the hazard of commenting upon them no great source of editorial perturbation.

Professor Manley O. Hudson, of Harvard University, declares that a smoke-screen has been set up between the Permanent Court of International Justice and the American people. Answering the argument of certain politicians that the United States are "in favour of a Court, but not the Court," Mr. Hudson says, "no other Court is possible, and for anyone to suggest that the forty-seven nations which are now maintaining the Permanent Court should throw away all of their efforts and begin over again to suit America is little short of ridiculous." He contends that the Permanent Court embodies precisely what the American delegates were working for at the Hague Conferences of 1889 and 1907, and the fact that it is connected with the League of Nations does not make it any less a world Court. To Mr. Hudson the issue is perfectly clear. The United States must either accept the Permanent Court, or renounce it and so secede from the organized world.

Professor Hudson, to whom we have referred in the preceding item, thinks that the "Bok Peace Plan," submitted to the American people on the 7th instant in the shape of an informal referendum, "marks a distinct advance on the present situation." He prefers however, that the United States should become a member of the League of Nations "as at present constituted" with proper reservations. The Bok Plan recommends that without becoming a member of the League "as at present constituted," the United States should offer to extend its present co-operation with the League and participate in its work as a body of mutual consent under certain conditions detailed in the Plan. We await the issue of this referendum with much interest.

Mr. D. A. Rose, President of the Canadian Copyright Association, has furnished us with some very frank criticism of the views of the recent copyright legislation in Canada entertained by Le Droit d'Auteur-certain of which we had translated and reprinted in the November number of the REVIEW.

After stating that the Canadian Act of 1923 removes the objection raised by Le Droit d'Auteur, upon the provisions of the Act of 1921, to the adherence of Canada to the Revised Berne Convention, Mr. Rose proceeds to say that "the adoption of the 1921 unsolicited suggestions and advice of Le Droit d'Auteur in no way however satisfied that publication and it now merely shifts its fighting ground." Mr. Rose points out that Canada was not represented at the Conference at which the Revised Berne Convention was drafted, but that the Honourable Sydney Fisher at the Imperial Conference on the subject of Copyright in 1910 "announced definitely that there was no likelihood of Canada's adherence to the Berne Convention until the convention permitted a more marked differentiation between the treatment to be allotted to Unionist and non-Unionist authors." Continuing Mr. Rose declares that: "It is no secret that the 1914 Protocol was unanimously agreed to by the Union nations at the request of Canada and Canada alone. Nor is it any secret that Canada's desire for this Protocol was to enable Canada while adhering to the Berne Convention to properly protect herself in her commercial and economic relations with the United States. After the Union countries have unanimously provided Canada with the means of protecting her interests is it not somewhat impertinent for the official organ of the Union to practically question Canada's right to utilize those means ?"

In conclusion Mr. Rose asks: "Is it any great injustice to either a Canadian author or United States author for the Law of this country to state that Canada's requirements, in so far as literature is