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property, and that the defendant had illegally converted them to his own use. The contents of the paper read to the court not being proved, the plaintiff was bound to make out item by item. Judging from the evidence adduced on the part of the defendant, he understood the value of the property left in his charge to be $193; deducting the $31 admitted to be due from the plaintiff, the balance due to her would be $162. It had been urged by the defence that by means of many of the articles being destroyed by fire, he was entitled to be credited for them. If the jury were satisfied that he had taken proper care of them while under his charge, he was clearly entitled by law to have credit for them. Conceding this, it was for the jury to say if any and what balance was due to the plaintiff. The proof rested entirely upon the defendant's admission, and if they were satisfied with the testimony, they had a right to bind him by that admission, and assess the amount from the facts placed before them.

The jury retired, and after a short time returned a verdict for the plaintiff, with $125 damages.

REPLEVIN-IMPORTANT DECISION.

In the District Court for the city and county of Philadelphia, before Judge Stroud and a special jury, R. & H. Weed & Co. vs. Hill, Fish, and Abbe. This was an action of replevin, to recover certain goods and merchandise, enumerated in the Writ and Declaration, valued at $919 46. The plaintiffs are merchants of New York, and the defendants common carriers between the cities of New York and Philadelphia.

The facts of the case, as detailed in the evidence, were briefly as follows: In the month of September, 1835, Isaac Campbell, of Alton, Illinois, went to the city of New York, with the view of purchasing goods. He represented to the plaintiffs that he was a member of the firm of Isaac Campbell & Co., which firm, he said, consisted of his father, his brother, and himself that the firm was free from debt-that his father was in affluent circumstances, and the capital of the firm was about $10,000.

Upon the faith of these representations, the plaintiffs sold him the goods in question. It was in proof that he bought goods of many other persons in New York, by means of similar representations. The goods sold by the plaintiffs, as well as others, were packed up in cases and bales, marked "Isaac Campbell & Co., Alton, Illinois," and delivered to the defendants, for conveyance to Philadelphia, thence to be forwarded to Illinois.

On the arrival of the goods in Philadelphia, they were seized under processes of foreign attachment, by pre-existing creditors of Isaac Campbell, whose debts amounted to several thousand dollars. Campbell absconded upon the laying of the attachments. It was afterwards ascertained that he was largely in debt in Philadelphia-that he was wholly insolvent, and that no such firm existed as Isaac Campbell & Co. Campbell afterwards fled to Texas.

This replevin was issued to take the goods out of the hands of the defendants, who were mere stakeholders for the parties entitled, either the plaintiffs or the attaching creditors.

The plaintiffs' counsel contended, 1st, That the plaintiffs had a right to stop the goods in transitu, in their transit from New York to Illinois, in consequence of the insolvency of the pretended purchaser, Isaac Campbell.

2d. That the contract of sale was annulled and rescinded by the fraud

and falsehood which were practised to obtain the goods, and that no proper ty passes where a purchase is brought about by misrepresentation.

His honor, Judge Stroud, charged the jury, that if they believed the evidence, they must find for the plaintiff-that the contract was vitiated by the fraud, and no property could pass under such circumstances. Verdict for plaintiffs. For plaintiffs, Job R. Tyson, Esq. For defendants, S. H. Perkins, Esq.

IMPRISONMENT FOR DEBT-IMPORTANT DECISION IN LOUISIANA.

Judgment was pronounced on the 2d of June, 1840, by Judge Buchanan, of the First Judicial District Court of Louisiana, in a case where the securities on a bail bond, executed previous to the act of 1840, abolishing imprisonment for debt, sought to be released from their obligation. The suit was instituted in 1836, the defendant arrested, and set at liberty on giving bail for his appearance. Judgment was rendered in favor of plaintiff in the District Court. An appeal was taken to the Supreme Court, where the judgment of the court below was affirmed. In the mean time, however, the Legislature had abolished the writ of capias ad satisfaciendum. The securities on the bail bond, confiding in the supposition that the new law cancelled their obligation, moved for a rule on the plaintiffs, to show cause why the bond should not be annulled, on the ground that by virtue of the act abolishing imprisonment for debt, the securities were disabled from performing the condition of their bond, and their responsibility had therefore ceased. On these facts and pleading, the rule came up before the court for trial. In the argument, the strongest ground urged for the application was, that the late law abolishing imprisonment, has deprived the bail of the means of performing the condition of the bail bond, and has thereby discharged the bail. The answer to the argument was, that the Legislature cannot interfere with the rights of the plaintiffs. Their rights spring from the bail bond. It created an obligation between them and the bail, which must be construed and decided by the laws in force when the contract was made.

The law has no retrospective operation. The point was raised in argument, that the bail writ was a remedy which the Legislature may abolish. The answer to the objection was, that this is a right acquired under a remedy. The bond was taken the act was executed under the sanction and by the authority of law. A right was'vested thereby which cannot be divested by a subsequent law. What the plaintiffs claim, then, was not merely a remedy, but a right springing from a contract. The bail bond is the property of the plaintiffs-property acquired under and in virtue of a law, and beyond the control of the Legislature. After taking the matter under mature consideration, the court stated its construction of the act of 1840 as applicable to this case to be, that either the plaintiffs have a right to sue out a ca. sa. on the return of the fi. fa. "no property found," notwithstanding the repealing provision in the first section of the act, or that the return of the "nulla bona" fixes the bail. The reason of the construction is, the constitutional provision forbidding the passage of laws impairing the obligations of contracts. The bail bond is a contract between the signers and the sheriff, the rights of which latter are vested in the plaintiff by an assignment. The only mode by which the bail in the present case can be exonerated, is by surrendering the principal. Upon such surrender, the defendant could claim his discharge in three months, by the operation of the 4th section of the act of 1840. It is therefore ordered, adjudged, and decreed, that the rule be discharged, with costs.

EVILS OF COMMERCE.

The Annual Sermon, preached at New Haven, on the 19th of June, 1839 before the Board of Missions of the Protestant Episcopal Church, by the Rev. John S. Stone, D. D., Rector of St. Paul's Church, Boston.

MUCH has been said at various times and on various occasions, on the benefits which commerce has conferred on mankind. This is a fruitful theme, on which the poet and the orator have delighted to dwell; but the evils of commerce have been but rarely touched upon. To the picture of commerce there are shades as well as lights-and they have lately been presented to the public in strong relief by a master's hand.

The sermon before us is a production of no ordinary power; but is well calculated to interest the reader, as well by the strength of the language, the purity of the style, the cogency of the reasoning, and the correctness of the views, as by the great importance of the subject to which it princi pally relates, viz.: "the bearings of modern commerce on the progress of missions." The text of the discourse is very happily taken from Isaiah, "Surely the isles shall wait for me, and the ships of Tarshish first to bring thy sons from far, their silver and their gold with them, uzi the name of the Lord thy God, and to the Holy One of Israel, because he hath glorified thee."

lx. 9.

In the outset of his discourse, the author bears the following testimony to the benefits which mankind derive from commerce :

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Among all the means used in converting the human race to Christ, commerce, no doubt, is to be one of the most important. Three fifths of the earth's surface are covered with waters: while the remaining fifths lie in the shape of two vast continents, and of innumerable isles, the abodes of men, and the depositories of those treasures which God has given for the use of men. Between these, the great deep is a broad highway; and commerce, with her ships, the only system of intercommunication. Without commerce, neither science nor art, neither civilization nor religion, could spread beyond the boundaries of the land of their birth. All other agencies, not purely spiritual, are, when left to themselves, local. has the only created arm that can reach round the globe."

Commerce

He enumerates many of the blessings which modern commerce has conferred on man-showing that it has been the occasion of a great extension of the arts of civilization, and of the blessings of true religion-that within the last half century, her ships have wafted the true missionary of the Cross with the true gospel of Christ, and with the elements of true Christian civilization, to almost every part of the earth. And in almost numberless ways, through the channels which she has opened, almost numberless blessings have been spread over the world. But, then, he says, all this has been but an incident to the system, not its main object, nor yet its main result. It has not grown out of the spirit and tendency of commerce, but has come to pass in spite of that spirit and tendency. The blessings which commerce has carried, were not in her heart. They only followed unbidden in her train. They went, not by her, but with her, and often in spite of her. And that while, therefore, we must not be unmindful of the good of which she has been the occasion, this good must not be suffered to blind us to her real character, and to her own proper works

He then goes on to describe the evils of modern commerce-which he does in a manner to arrest the attention of the philanthropist, and awaken all his energies to provide a remedy. He shows that modern commerce, owing to the discoveries of new and rich countries, which were well calculated to gratify "the lust of power and lust of gold," which had been cherished by the nations of Europe, became in her very first movements, and has ever since continued, a colonizing spirit. Ships visited the new world, not to communicate, in exchange for honestly acquired wealth, knowledge, and civilization, peace and love, but to pour in colonies of foreigners; to take possession of whole countries in the name of an arrogant and distant usurper; and, under pretence of planting the cross, and of spreading a religion of which they knew nothing but the name, to grasp at the whole incalculable mass of the treasures of the richest portion of the earth. Modern commerce thus soon became a war-waging spirit. Having first by deceit and treachery roused the simple natives of the western world to resistance, it opened on them those baying mouths of death, its musketry and its cannon, and drove wars of extermination through their beautiful isles. And under the influences which reigned over its origin, modern commerce speedily became a slave-making spirit; for in the womb of modern commerce, begotten by the lust of gold, was first conceived an idea, which has since been the parent of the deepest wrongs and miseries which this earth has ever suffered the idea of filling the places made vacant by the vanishing of one race, with slaves, captured and dragged thither from another.

Nor is this all modern commerce early became, and has since continued, a corrupting spirit. It corrupted the bodies and minds of the once beautiful and healthy, the comparatively pure and innocent aborigines of every land which it visited, by the systematic introduction and supply of intoxicating liquors, and by the reckless dissemination of the dark vices and deadly diseases of a misnamed civilization. In the former, it opened on them the burning waters of a river of death; and, in the latter, poured through the veins of both their bodies and their souls, the creeping poisons of a physical and a moral pestilence. Not content with this, it opened the very prisons and poor-houses of the old world, and vomited forth upon the new, colonies of the vile and the licentious, of the thieves and the assassins, with which the dark and corrupt bosom of so called Christian Europe teemed. Indeed, so far as the system of commercial aggrandizement is concerned, but one spirit has actuated the whole, from its conception to its present maturity; and this spirit has been "a fiery, rabid, quenchless lust of gold."

Dr. Stone then briefly alludes to the horrid scenes in history, which the Spaniards enacted in Mexico, Peru, and Paraguay-the Portuguese and Dutch in the broad Brazils, and in the rich isles and peninsulas of Eastern India and to the scenes amid which the commerce of humane, noble, Christian Britain, introduced and carried forward its system of territorial acquisition in Bengal and throughout all Hindostan, in New Holland and through the myriad isles of the smiling Pacific, filling the most extensive and populous regions with some of the bloodiest and most devastating curses ever felt; and finally, to those scenes nearer home, amidst which the com. bined and successive cruelties of the French, the English, and the inhabitants of our own United States, "have, for two hundred years, by treachery and the sword, by disseminating intemperance and disease, been weakening,

wasting, and blotting out the thousand tribes of one of the once finest races of men that God ever formed, the aborigines of our own North America!"

Modern commerce, says the reverend author, during the 350 years of her reign, has furnished for herself the materials of a darker, bloodier history, than that which has been written of the tyrants of the earth during the whole 4,000 years of ante-christian barbarism. Referring to the efforts of British merchants to introduce and extend into all populous China, that awful curse, the opium trade, he says:

"If missionaries, by the help of coasting-vessels, attempt to introduce into that vast empire the Word of life, men at home grow at once exceedingly conscientious, and cry out against the effort, as an interference with the religious institutions of the land. But they make no scruple in illicitly introducing there the drug of death, and that, in the face of the most solemnly proclaimed prohibitions of the emperor and his government. I do not suppose they would feel any special pleasure in murdering, outright, the three hundred millions of China; yet, for the sake of abstracting the immense wealth of the country, they would not hesitate to do what is worse, to besot both their bodies and their souls with a poison, which, in its work of human destruction, has no compeer, save in that perhaps peerless agent of Satan, alcohol!"

The following picture is drawn by the hand of a master, who, we have too much reason to believe, has not borrowed from imagination, but has based all his assertions on frightful reality:

"When commerce, with her newly invented mariner's compass in her hand, went forth to the discovery of a new world, peopled with before unknown races of men, simple and guileless, generous and trusting; what a precious, what a glorious opportunity was presented for carrying to them the blessings of real civilization, of useful knowledge and of pure religion; and thus, for pouring the very soul of a heaven-descended Christianity into the minds, into the social state, and into the political and religious institutions of those who looked up to the newly arrived with feelings of venera tion, as to beings of a superior order! How was this opportunity improved? By holding out, at first, a wooden cross, as the symbol of an unexplained gospel, and calling on the wondering multitudes to bow down and worship; and then, in their bowed-down posture, loading them with every form and with every extreme of intolerable wrong. Instead of Christianizing, the process exterminated. In the West Indies, the whole native population became speedily extinct, the ten millions of that almost unearthly race, gentle Charibs, vanished like a morning mist before their oppressors. They bled in war; they wasted away in the mines; they toiled to death in the sugar-mills; they were torn in pieces by trained squadrons of ferocious dogs; and they pined and died in the dens and caves, whither they had fled from the foot of their civilized persecutors; until, at length, their native lands held not in life a single remaining trace of their once beautiful forms. They had disappeared from the earth; and, as their spirits vanished, they went full of execrations upon the very name of that Christianity which should have been the instrument of both their temporal and their eternal salvation.

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"In Mexico and Peru, history records that the Spanish sword drank the blood of forty millions of their sons. The whole Indian race in Newfoundland is extinct. Entire tribes in South Africa, and in North America, are

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