at once to Lord Advocate Shaw, who had always been sympathetic towards the reform movement, and who cordially agreed to take up the subject. But, of course, a new Government had many other things to think of, and, besides that, Mr. Shaw had in his mind a new scheme of workmen's compensation legislation, which might affect a Sheriff Court bill, and so more time passed. In the interval the privilege of appeal to Edinburgh for jury trial, the abuse of which, in cases arising under the Employers' Liability Act, had become a scandal, was, as regards that class of litigation, abolished in the Workmen's Compensation Act of 1906, upon the understanding that a local system in the Sheriff Court should take its place. Accordingly, the bill introduced by Mr. Shaw embodied such a scheme, as well as consolidating and modernising existing procedure enactments. Such a bill was naturally the subject of much criticism, and a good deal of difference of opinion, but it was obvious that there could be little or no hope of the bill passing unless it could be presented to Parliament as a non-party, non-controversial measure. For some four months conference, discussion, and compromise went on, but ultimately the Lord Advocate was able to present the bill to the Scotch Grand Committee, with the outcome of the negotiations summarised in a list of amendments so-called, but which were not amendments in the sense of suggestions for discussion by the Grand Committee, but rather tabulated results of the discussion which had already taken place outside. The Scottish members upon the Grand Committee appreciated the mode adopted for whipping the bill into shape outside, and so saving the Grand Committee itself much labour inside the House, but, despite the acceptance of the bill by Scotch members on the Government and Opposition benches alike, for three days the Lord Advocate had to fight in committee uninformed English and Irish criticism, which very nearly approached, if it did not attain to, deliberate obstruction, and which brought the end of the session perilously near before the bill was reported to the House. Even at that stage there was opposition, but ultimately it went to the Lords just as it had come through the Commons Committee, and, being accepted by the Lords, it has passed into law.

For this happy result the legal profession are under a deep debt of gratitude to Lord Advocate Shaw, whose grasp of a highly technical subject, his courteous and conciliatory attitude towards all criticism, however ill-informed, and his unrivalled skill in parliamentary warfare, enabled him to save the bill from the fate which has overtaken so many other

Scotch bills this session. The Lord Advocate is to be congratulated upon his achievement. But we are certain he would be the first man to admit that to the crew, as well as to the captain, belongs some of the credit for the successful termination of a stormy voyage, and the services of the committee of lawyers ought not to be lost sight of. From the moment they drafted the bill-over three years ago they never ceased, in season and out of season, to influence public opinion in its favour, and amidst many disappointments they never lost heart. To the enthusiasm and the special knowledge of the chairman of this committee, Sheriff Fyfe, of Glasgow, they largely owe their triumph. From beginning to end he has been the moving spirit of the movement, although the last man to put himself forward. To the Sheriffs-Substitute Association, of which he is secretary, belongs the chief credit of pushing the appointment of the Departmental Committee. Before that Committee he was the chief witness, and upon him mainly devolved the labour of preparing for that Committee the material upon which they based their report. When, upon the issue of the report, the legal representative committee was formed, they naturally turned to Sheriff Fyfe for their chairman, and during its three years' progress he has taken a deep interest in the efforts to produce a bill of non-contentious clauses. Again and again he has been called in to assist the authorities, which his peculiar and intimate acquaintance with the subject enabled him to do. Although the fight for the bill happened to fall in his vacation month, the Sheriff was all through at the elbow of the Lord Advocate in London, sacrificing the charms of the golf links to help his pet scheme towards legislative life. To him, we doubt not, it has been a labour of love, for the profession well know his keen interest in all that pertains to the Sheriff Court, in which he has, with success equally at the bar and on the bench, spent his lifetime; but, love or no love, it must, nevertheless, have been a labour of no mean order, and the lawyers of Scotland are well aware that to him and the members of his committee (of course, under Providence, as represented by a Liberal Government with an able Lord Advocate and an obedient majority) they owe that this much-needed and long-hoped-for reform work has been at length accomplished.

The promoters have not, of course, got all they would have liked. No promoters ever do. But this Act marks a new era in the history of the Sheriff Court, which has long been steadily growing in favour with the litigating public, and in which, as it is now constituted and equipped, there is quietly but

efficiently done a large volume of unreported judicial work of not less importance than that disposed of by the Supreme Court in Edinburgh.

THE BANKRUPTCY (SCOTLAND) BILL, 1907.

I.

THE hopes of the advocates of a substantial measure of reform in our law of bankruptcy appear at last to be within at least a measurable distance of fruition. This bill, which is the result of much discussion and careful preparation, and which, it is understood, owes its draughtsmanship chiefly to the labours of a well-known and much-respected member of the legal profession in the commercial capital of the west, was introduced in the House of Commons by Mr. Cleland and read a first time on 4th July last. While it may be regretted that there appears to be no very immediate prospect of its passing through the legislative machinery, there seems, in view of the fact that the bill is uncontentious and desired by every section of the community, to be every prospect in the not-distant future that reforms so necessary, so long and so ardently desired, and, generally speaking, so efficiently incorporated in the text of the bill, may at last receive legislative sanction. In view of the widespread interest in the subject, it is proposed in this and the succeeding short articles to give a summary of the leading amendments and alterations which the bill proposes to effect in our law of bankruptcy.

While it must, at the outset, be conceded that the bill is a moderate, wise, and temperate measure, eminently adapted to effect amendments and to redress anomalies of long standing in our law of bankruptcy, and to bring that law more nearly into consonance with the necessities of modern commercial enterprise in relation to bankruptcy procedure, it must be confessed that its provisions will not in some particulars altogether satisfy the aspirations of the more ardent advocates of a drastic measure of reform. At the same time one cannot fail to recognise that many of the reforms which have, at one time and another, been advocated are somewhat utopian in their character, and are both dissonant to modern sentiment and unsuited to the requirements of modern commercial life. In three important particulars, however, the bill introduces alterations in our law which cannot be described otherwise than as revolutionary, and in at least one further particular it introduces a modification which will prove of inestimable benefit. That modification consists in the abolition of the distinction between the Lord Ordinary and the Sheriff

as a judge of first instance, in so far that all applications or petitions may in future be presented either to the Lord Ordinary or the Sheriff indiscriminately. By the interpretation clause the word " Court," which is exclusively used throughout the bill, is held to mean and include (where the context does not expressly show that jurisdiction is exclusively conferred on the Supreme Court) the Lord Ordinary, the Lord Ordinary on the Bills, and the Sheriff, which latter word, as formerly, includes Sheriffs-Substitute. And, as a corollary, section 169 provides that any law agent, whether entitled to practise before the Court of Session or merely in the inferior Courts, shall be entitled to appear in any bankruptcy proceedings, and to plead before any judge before whom such proceedings pend. The revolutionary changes proposed to be effected by the bill are (first) the abolition of the process of cessio and the introduction of a process of "summary sequestration," possessing all the advantages which now belong to cessio, but with none of its disadvantages, and the assimilation of the law of cessio to that of sequestration in the main particulars in which the former admittedly falls short of the latter. (Second) the extension of the provisions whereby the debtor's estate may be wound up under a deed of arrangement to include trust deeds, with a trustee possessing all the powers of administration and principles of ranking of a trustee in a sequestration, and a committee of creditors analogous to, and possessing powers similar to those of, the commissioners in a sequestration. (Third) (and perhaps most important) the exclusion of voluntary trust deeds by an insolvent from the category of extrajudicial settlements, and their inclusion in the process of sequestration, with provisions for the appointment of the trustee directly by the creditors themselves, and of means under certain prescribed conditions of compelling a recalcitrant creditor or creditors to accede to the terms of the deed, and the placing of such deeds directly under the supervision of the Accountant and the Court.

The Punishment of Fraudulent Debtors.--In view of the fact that to many advocates of reform the provisions which deal with the punishment of fraudulent debtors are conceived to be those most urgently required, it may be convenient at the outset to detail shortly the provisions of the bill which have that object in view. The controversy between the advocates of a drastic measure of reform and those who press for reform of a less revolutionary and more temperate character centres generally round the question whether the power of imprisonment for debt should, under more or less stringent restrictions

and limitations, be restored to creditors. Now, it will be convenient to remember that, while the Act of 1880 professed in its title to abolish imprisonment for debt and to provide for the better punishment of fraudulent debtors, it, as a matter of fact, neither abolished imprisonment for debt nor did it provide, as experience has since proved, more adequate means for the effectual punishment of fraudulent debtors than those previously existing. But the framers of the Act appear to have regarded, though, perhaps, not with complete or intelligent apprehension, the one clause as the necessary correlative or complement of the other. The abolition of the power of imprisonment appears to have been regarded as a necessary concession to public sentiment. But the necessity for the provision of additional means for the punishment of fraudulent debtors appears to have been regarded as a necessary consequence or result of that concession. Under the law as it stood prior to 1880 there existed, both at common law and under statute, tolerably effective judicial machinery for the detection and punishment of fraud, which, though in some cases it pressed with some severity on debtors, at any rate afforded adequate protection to the debtor. It must be remembered that prior to 1880 imprisonment was not only a means of punishing fraudulent debtors. It was besides, and perhaps mainly, a method of compelling a recalcitrant debtor to make payment of his debts. We see that, in the case of alimentary debts, it still possesses this character. If the Sheriff is satisfied that the father of an illegitimate child is wilful in his failure to provide aliment for which the mother has obtained decree, he has power to commit the recalcitrant father to prison. But the imprisonment, or its threat, is obviously imposed not as a consequence of any fraudulent or criminal intent on the part of the debtor, but solely as a means of compelling him to pay his debt. Yet if the father of a bastard child may justly be imprisoned for wilful failure to pay sums of aliment decerned against him, there seems logically no reason why he should not equally be subject to imprisonment for wilful failure to pay sums due by him for, say, household necessaries or provisions. Yet, so little is our modern legislation governed by logical consistency as compared with sentiment, the mere hint of the desirability of giving a grocer or a bootmaker similar powers of compulsion raises a howl of indignation on the part of outraged and somewhat mawkish sentimentality. To punish fraud by imprisonment is one thing, but to use it, or the threat of it, as a method of compelling a debtor to pay his debts