I am credibly informed that a member of one of the leading commercial firms of this city about one month since circulated a petition among the wholesale merchants protesting against the passage of the bankruptcy bill now pending in the Senate of the United States, and procured many signatures thereto. It has further been stated to me that many such signatures were obtained upon the representation that the passage of the bankruptcy bill would be detrimental to the best interests of the mercantile community; that it would enable fraudulent insolvents "to cheat their creditors" and, notwithstanding, procure their discharge; that the administration of such a law would entail great expense and loss upon them, and that they, the merchants, would be more at the mercy of their debtors than now under the respective State laws. That it was an injudicious exercise of judgment and a gross error on the part of the merchants to sign such a petition objecting and protesting to the passage of the present pending bankruptcy bill I will endeavor to demonstrate.

That there ought to be a uniform system of commercial law throughout the United States none will gainsay. Now we have as many different methods of making collections as there are States in the Union, and every merchant when he sells goods is bound to take notice of the grossly unequal, and in many cases ineffective, insolvent laws of the various States, and of the preferences that may be given thereunder by a local debtor to certain favored creditors. Many merchants, remembering the unsatisfactory workings under the act of 1867, are prejudiced against the passage of any bankrupt act whatsoever. They forget that the Bankrupt Act of 1867 was a measure hurriedly passed through Congress at the close of the war on the demand of a particular class; that the law was in a measure crude and cumbersome in many respects; that the officers executing the law were interested in prolonging the pendency of proceedings in order to create more costs, fees, and expenses for themselves; that the costs of winding up estates was a grievous burden; that gross frauds were perpetrated thereunder by unscrupulous debtors; that the law was loaded down with so many obnoxious amendments as to create a demand for its repeal, and that the law was repealed in 1878.

Merchants remember these things and also the rush of debtors to take advantage of the benefits of the act just prior to its repeal, and hence their easily aroused prejudices to favor the petition to

protest against the passage of any act that bears the title of the old act of 1867. Another reason why some of the leading houses object to the passage of the bill arises from the fact that by making. the distribution of an insolvent's estate uniform among all classes of creditors they lose the great advantage they now possess over other creditors in securing a preference from the insolvent debtor. The merchant and debtor understand so well the reciprocal rights and duties that arise out of the giving of such preferences that it is unnecessary to dilate further upon it. It is because of such preferences that many fraudulent debtors are now successfully engaged in business under the cloak of some convenient relative's name, holding at bay the creditors who are not so preferred.

For the past ten years the passage of a uniform bankrupt act has been advocated. Measure after measure has been introduced in Congress tending to legislation to that end. The judiciary committee of the Senate and House of Representatives have long had the matter under consideration. The ablest men in the country in and out of Congress have devoted their best thoughts to the subject. All arguments pro and con, all suggestions, all petitions or remonstrances have been heard, weighed, criticised, and judged. The result of these deliberations is the bill passed about ten days ago in the House of Representatives. No one will contend that it is an absolutely perfect measure, but it is as near a perfect measure as human ingenuity in the use of language can frame a law.

The great merit of the present bankrupt act is its great simplicity, its inexpensiveness to all parties, its rapid and speedy winding up of estates, its perfect fairness to the debtor and creditor classes, its prevention of preferences among creditors and their scramble to first pounce upon the unfortunate debtor, the ample opportunities it offers to rip up fraudulent transactions and the punishment of parties who attempt or do carry out fraudulent practices, the safeguards it throws around mercantile transactions, investing them with greater confidence and a higher degree of integrity, the release of the honest debtor from the liabilities resting upon him, and the withholding of a discharge from a fraudulent debtor.

One feature of the present bill specially to be commended is that the officers interested in carrying out its provisions receive their compensation based on the amount of the dividend declared and not on the amount of assets that come into or pass through their hands, and payment to them is only made after the dividend is declared. Hence it is to the interest of the referee and trustee to wind up the estate as speedily as possible and with the least

necessary expense. Every dollar of expense incurred to that extent lessens the amount of the dividend to be declared, and necessarily the compensation to the trustee. In fact, the compensation under this act is not equivalent in percentage to that received by an assignee or administrator under the State laws.

Another valuable feature is the provision relating to compromises with creditors. Under the old law a debtor could offer a proposition of compromise, and if accepted by his creditors could withdraw his offer or refuse to carry it out, and if he thought his creditors would accept a less offer make another proposition more favor.. able to his interests. Under the new bill he cannot thus play with the credulity of his creditors. He cannot offer a composition until after he has been thoroughly examined in open court or at a meeting of his creditors touching his assets and liabilities, and furnished a complete list of his creditors and his assets. If the offer is less than fifty cents on the dollar of his liabilities the offer must be accepted by three-fourths in number of his creditors who represent three-fourths of the amount of his indebtedness, and the money, notes, or securities wherewith to pay the compromise must be deposited in court for the benefit of creditors; and if the court finds that the proposition of compromise is for the best interests of the creditors; that the debtor has not done anything that would prevent a discharge in bankruptcy; that the failure is not due to any fraudulent acts committed by him, and that the offer is made in good faith and not brought about by unfair means, then the compromise is permitted to be carried out. If the offer is for more than fifty cents on the dollar the same provisions apply, only that the number of creditors assenting need be only a majority in number representing a majority in amount of his indebtedness.

My communication having obtained greater length than intended precludes me from intruding further upon your valuable space to speak of many other provisions in the bill, but it must be apparent to the most casual reader hereof that every one ought to be in favor of its enactment into a law, and instead of protesting against its adoption should communicate by letter to the Senators of this State, favoring its adoption and asking them to speedily facilitate its passage. A. BINSWANGER. Chicago.

THE THING to be done does not choose to tarry the leisure of the doer, but the doer must be at the beck of the thing to be done, and not treat it as a secondary affair.-Repub. Plato, ii, 370.

SUNDAY REST.

A school of anti-religious secularists, and a small but active body of Christians who hold to the seventh-day Sabbath, are carrying on an active propaganda, especially on the Pacific coast; while working on the same lines throughout the country is the large and powerful class of manufacturers and sellers of intoxicating liquors, and others whose pecuniary interests demand, as they think, a free Sunday. Their combined influence was strong enough to secure, in 1882, the repeal of the very moderate Sunday laws of California, though those laws had previously been sustained by the Supreme Court of the State; and up to the present time it has prevented the re-enactment of such laws. This hostility to the Sunday laws is avowedly based upon the ground that such laws are an infringement of the religious liberty which is involved in the separation of Church and State, and which is guaranteed by constitutional provisions.

That such conception or misconception of the nature and grounds of the Sunday laws prevails to some extent beyond these classes would seem to follow, on the one hand, from the fact that these laws are often permitted to become a dead letter; and, on the other hand, from the attempts which are not infrequently made to secure, by means of civil enactments, the redress of evils which lie outside the proper sphere of the law.

In view of these considerations, it will not, perhaps, be out of place to present a brief résumé of the constitutional basis of our Sunday laws, and their relation to our free institutions.

One fact meets us at the outset, a fact sometimes overlooked in this discussion, which it may be well to note in passing-it is the prescriptive and presumptive right of our American Sunday laws. The Christian Sabbath is an institution of the people, older than our government; existing before the adoption of our constitutions and the enactment of our laws. The institutions of a people are the outgrowth of its life, as the fruit is of the life of a tree. The proper purpose of statute law is to give to them definite force, and to protect their observance. Says a late Chief Justice of Pennsylvania: "A nation has a right to its customs, and to its customary institutions, as it has a right to its development, for they are the very form of its reason, and it must act according to them and can do nothing without them; and a main purpose of government is to protect and enforce them." Popular institutions may change, may be modified by other growths, and then in time the laws

which protect them may likewise be changed. But while the institution continues it would seem as if the law which protects it has no need to apologize for its place in the statute books. But we waive this point, that we may fix attention on others which may be regarded as of more weight in the present discussion.

I. In inquiring into the constitutional basis of our American Sunday laws, the first and most important point to be noticed is that these laws do not rest upon a religious ground. They do not compel the religious observance of the day. So explicit is the language of the statutes and decisions of the Courts on this point, that it is difficult to see how this feature of the Sunday laws can be gainsaid, and yet it is just on this point that those who are opposed to our Sunday laws rest their main objection.

It is, of course, beyond question that in the laws by which the early colonists recognized and protected their "Sabbath," the religious element was conspicuous, as it was in the corresponding laws of the countries from which they came. It is the same with the laws which protected marriage and the family. Whatever germs of the great idea of the separation of Church and State, and the confinement of each within its own sphere of action, may have existed in the minds of men of that day, these germs had not yet ripened into definite principles of consistent action. But when the separation of Church and State came to be more fully understood and applied, the early Sunday laws were modified in conformity with the principle. Provisions of a purely religious character being eliminated, there remained the sanitary, social, industrial, and political benefits of the institution, which, as in the case of marriage and the family, rightfully claimed the recognition of the State, and furnished just ground for appropriate legislation. The distinction was made between the Sabbath as an institution of religion and the observance of Sunday as a civil institution. This distinction has been carefully observed by Legislatures and the Courts. Sunday laws are now upon the statute books of every State but California. In general, these laws forbid on Sunday common labor and traffic, except in case of necessity or mercy; public or noisy amusements, or whatever is likely to disturb the quiet and order of the day. They make Sunday a non-legal day; courts may not sit, nor legal processes be served, except in specified cases. It will be seen that they do not enforce or prohibit any observance of religion. They leave each man free to do or omit doing on Sunday what he chooses, within certain restrictions which are deemed necessary to the public peace and order and the gen