some for friendship, some for profit, and some for kindred would gladly use my furtherance to bring them to your presense; and now, if I should take anything of them, I should do them great wrong, because they may daily do as much for themselves; which thing, though it is in you sir, very commendable, yet to me I find it nothing profitable.” To whom the incorruptible Judge replied: "But this one thing I assure thee, on my faith, that if the parties will at my hands call for justice and equity, then, although it were my father, whom I reverence dearly that stood on the one side, and the devil, whom I hate extremely, were on the other side, his cause being just, the devil of me should have his right."

He advocated a course of procedure by which law and equity might be beneficially administered by the same tribunal, seeking to induce the common law Judges to relax the rigour of their rules with the view to meet the justice of particular cases, thus anticipating the Judicature Act of 1873 and Amending Acts.

Instead of referring everything to a Master, it is said of him, he used to examine all matters that came before him, like an arbitrator; and he patiently worked them out himself to a final decree, which he drew and signed.

More, as Lord Chancellor, had not only high judicial duties to discharge, but owing to his position his political functions were no less onerous and important. Shortly after he was appointed Lord Chancellor the King consulted him on the question of the divorce. More frankly told him he was opposed to his design. The King, however, assured him he was quite free to hold his own opinion in this matter. When, after the lapse of some time, he found the King, owing to his intense and imperious will, was bound to break through every restraint and marry Anne Boleyn, More, as the sworn keeper of his conscience, petitioned him to be allowed to resign the Great Seal. The King was most reluctant to part with such an able and efficient servant and strongly urged him to suppress his conscientious scruples. This, the Chancellor, as a matter of conscience and as his legal adviser, could not do, and insisted upon resigning the Seal. On the 10th of May, 1532, his resignation was accepted, having held the position for only two and a half years. He left office a poor man with a large family to support. The Clergy in Convocation, owing to his necessitous condition, voted him a present of £5,000. This he absolutely re

fused to accept. His whole income, after resigning office, amounted to only £100 per year.

More refused the invitation to attend the coronation of Anne Boleyn. From this hour his fate was sealed. Henceforth he became the object of the deadly hate of the Queen. In November, 1534, the Act of Supremacy was passed. This was followed by another, declaring its denial to be an act of treason. More was sent for and ordered to take the oath. He offered to swear to uphold the succession of the Crown as settled by Parliament, but steadily refused to take the oath acknowledging "the King as the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England," as being contrary to his conscientious convictions. He was then committed to the Tower and after close confinement for more than a year was brought before a special Commission with a packed jury. By means of an act of perjury, on the part of a high official, a verdict of "guilty" was found. On the 7th of July, 1535, he was executed on Tower Hill; his four quarters set over four gates of the City, his head stuck on a pole and placed on London Bridge. What little property he left was confiscated by the inhuman tyrant, who, in his career of shame, exhibited a catalogue of vices enumerated by Hume as "violence, cruelty, profusion, obstinancy, rapacity, arrogance, bigotry, presumption and caprice "-a catalogue scarcely less damnatory than such as are contained in the list of the seven deadly sins.

Lord High Chancellor Campbell thus vindicates the character of Sir Thomas More: "Considering the splendour of his talents, the greatness of his acquirements, and the innocence of his life, we must still regard his murder as the blackest crime that ever has been perpetrated in England under the forms of law. . . . His character, both in public and in private life, comes as near to perfection as our nature will permit. .. Can we censure him for submitting to loss of office, imprisonment, and death, rather than make such a declaration? He implicitly yielded to the law regulating the succession to the Crown; and he offered no active opposition to any other law; only requiring that, on matters of opinion, he might be permitted to remain silent. The English Reformation was a glorious event, for which we never can be sufficiently grateful to Divine Providence; but I own I feel little respect for those by whose instrumen

tality it was first brought about; men generally swayed by their own worldly interests, and willing to sanction the worst passions of the tyrant to whom they looked for advancement. With all my Protestant zeal, I must feel a higher reverence for Sir Thomas More than for Thomas Cromwell or for Cranmer."

The Hon. Sydney Lee writes to the like effect: "More's piteous fate startled the world. The Emperor, Charles V., declared he would have rather lost his best city than such a counsellor. In all countries poets likened him to the greatest heroes of antiquity, to Socrates, Seneca, Aristides and Cato.

Surveying More from another side we find ourselves in the presence of one endowed with the finest enlightenment of the Renaissance, a man whose outlook on life was in ad vance of his generation; possessed too of such quickness of wit, such imaginative activity, such sureness of intellectual insight, that he could lay bare with pen all the defects, all the abuses, which worn-out conventions and lifeless traditions had imposed on the free and beneficent development of human endeavour and human society."

In the general opinion of Europe he foremost Englishman of the time was Sir Thomas More,"-is the testimony of the historian, John Richard Gron.

James Anthony Froude, who has been said to hold a brief for Henry, thus comments on the death of the great Lord Chancellor: "This was the execution of Sir Thomas More, an act which was sounded out into the far corners of the earth, and was the world's wonder as well for the circumstances under which it was perpetrated, as for the preternatural composure with which it was borne. Something of his calmness may have been due to his natural temperament, something to an unaffected weariness of a world which in his eyes was plunging into the ruin of the latter days. But those fair hues of sunny cheerfulness caught their colour from the simplicity of his faith; and never was there a Christian's victory over death more grandly evidenced than in that last. scene lighted with its lambent humour."

Thus passed one of the greatest and most upright Lord Chancellors that ever graced the marble chair; one whose heart was full of tender affection for all brought within the sphere of his activities; whose life was pure and whose hands were clean; one who counted life not dear when weighed

against the conscientious discharge of duty as the sworn adviser and keeper of his Sovereign's conscience; and one who was so clear in his great office that his virtues pleaded like angels trumpet-tongued against the deep damnation of his taking off.

St. John, N. B.

SILAS ALWARD.

The Bank Act permits banks to stipulate for seven per cent. interest. Suppose they stipulate for eight, can they recover seven, or only five, or nothing? I should have said seven; and, for second choice, nothing; the Judicial Committee gave the bank five.

The controlling section of the Bank Act is as follows:"The bank may stipulate for, take, reserve or exact any rate of interest or discount, not exceeding seven per centum per annum, and may receive and take in advance, any such rate, but no higher rate of interest shall be recoverable by the bank."

Referring to this clause, their Lordships said:

"Their Lordships are of opinion that the express provisions of the first portion of this clause rendered it ultra vires on the part of the bank to insert, in the chattel mortgage of 28th May 1907, the stipulation that interest should be payable at the rate of eight per cent., and that, therefore, that stipulation is inoperative. They are of opinion, therefore, that the contention on behalf of the plaintiff in this respect is right; and that the interest under that mortgage must be calculated at the rate of five per cent. per annum."

No further reason is offered, and there is no discussion of an argument which appears to render a contrary view inevitable. Shortly it is this: that the language under construction is part of the Revised Statutes of 1906 (ch. 29, sec. 91); that, prior to the revision, the construction of the same sentence, in the previous Bank Act, entitled the bank

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