value from place to place, at home or abroad, and balance the accounts of distant cities without the transmission of money; not only did they assign debts in the most convenient, extensive and effectual manner; but the value of a debt was improved by being authenticated in a bill of exchange, for it was thus reduced to a certain amount, which the debtor, having accepted, could not afterwards unsettle; evidence of the original demand was rendered unnecessary, and the bill afforded a plainer and more indisputable title to the whole debt. A creditor, too, by assigning to a man of property a bill at a long date, given him by his debtor, could obtain, for a trifling discount, his money in advance. Credit to the buyer was thus rendered consistent with ready money to the seller, and the reconciliation of the apparent inconsistency was brought about by a further benefit to a third person, for it was effected by advantageously employing the surplus and idle funds of the capitalist. At the first introduction of bills of exchange, however, the English courts of law regarded them with a jealous and evil eye, allowing them only between merchants; but their obvious advantages soon compelled the judges to sanction their use by all persons; and of late years the policy of the Bench has been industriously to remove every impediment, and add all possible facilities to these wheels of the vast commercial system.

The advantages of a bill of exchange in reducing a debt to a certainty, curtailing the evidence necessary to enforce payment, and affording the means of procuring ready money by discount, often induced creditors to draw a bill for the sake of acceptance; though there might be no intention of transferring the debt. Such a transaction pointed out the way to a shorter mode of effecting the same purpose by means of a promissory note. Promissory notes soon circulated like bills of exchange, and became as common as bills themselves. Notes for small sums, payable to bearer on demand, were found to answer most purposes of the ordinary circulating medium, and have at length, in all civilized countries, supplanted a great portion of the gold and silver previously in circulation. Great, however, as was the saving, and numerous the advantages arising from the substitution, it was discovered by experience that the dangers and inconveniences of an unlimited issue of paper money were at least as great. The legislature have, therefore, found it necessary to place the issue of negotiable notes for small

sums under the restrictions which will be pointed out in this work; and experience has proved that the only mode of preserving paper money on a level with gold is to compel the utterers to exchange it for gold, at the option of the holder. And peradventure even then, unless the state control the issue of paper, on principles controverted and imperfectly understood at present, the value of the whole circulating medium may decline together, as compared with other commodities or the currency of foreign countries, and the consequent tendency of the precious metals to leave the kingdom may, by narrowing the basis of the currency, endanger the whole superstructure.

During the suspension of cash payments and the circulation of one-pound notes, nearly every payment in this country was made in paper. And some idea may be formed of the immense amount of property now afloat in bills and notes, when it is considered that all payments for our immense exports and imports, almost every remittance to and from every quarter of the world, nearly every payment of large amount between distant places in the kingdom, and a large proportion of payments in the same place, are made through the intervention of bills; not to mention the amount of common promissory notes, at long and short dates, the notes of the Bank of England and country banks, and the universal and daily increasing use of checks. It will not, perhaps, be an unreasonable inference that the bills and notes of all kinds, issued and circulated in the United Kingdom in the space of a single year, amount to many hundred millions.

Simple as the form of a bill or note may appear, the rights and liabilities of the different parties to those instruments have given rise to an infinity of legal questions, and multitudes of decisionsa striking proof of what the experience of all ages had already made abundantly manifest,-that law is, in its own nature, necessarily voluminous; that its complexity and bulk constitute the price that must be paid for the reign of certainty, order and uniformity; and that any attempt to regulate multiform combinations of circumstances, by a few general rules, however skillfully constructed, must be abortive.

In France this subject has been briefly but luminously treated, first by Dupuy de la Serra, in a little book entitled "L'Art des

Lettres de Change," and afterwards by Pothier, whose work, as well as his other performances, and in particular the Traité des Obligations, evinces a profound acquaintance with the principles of jurisprudence, and extraordinary acumen and sagacity in their application; the result of the laborious exercise of his talents on the Roman law. There cannot be a greater proof of the surpassing merit of his works than that, after the lapse of more than half a century, and a stupendous revolution in all the institutions of his country, many parts of his writings have been incorporated, word for word, in the new Code of France. The Traité du Contrat de Change is often cited in the English courts of law. "The authority of Pothier," says the present learned chief justice* of the Common Pleas, "is as high as can be had, next to the decision of a court of justice in this country; his writings are considered by Sir William Jones as equal, in point of luminous method, apposite examples, and a clear manly style, to the works of Littleton on the Laws of England."†

In this country the growth of the law on bills and notes has been almost proportionate to the increase of those instruments; insomuch that within the last sixty years the reported decisions upon them in law, equity, and bankruptcy, would fill many volumes. Numerous have been the attempts to reduce the mass of authorities to the shape of a regular treatise; but amongst all these, two only are now in common use in the profession, the treatise of Mr. Chitty and the summary of Mr. Justice Bayley.‡

The work of the learned judge is written with the greatest circumspection; but it is now out of print, and the latest edition some years old.§

Mr. Chitty's treatise is a laborious and full collection of almost all the cases, by an eminent counsel, the extent of whose legal ac

*Lord Chief Justice Best.

Cox . Troy, 5 B. & A. 481 (7 E. C. L. R.). There is now also an able modern French work on the same subject by M. Noguier. In America have recently appeared the Commentaries of Mr. Justice Story on the Law of Bills of Exchange, and his Commentaries on the Law of Promissory Notes.

Mr. Roscoe's Digest and Mr. Johnson's book had not appeared when these observations were written.

? A new edition has since been published.

quirements, and the readiness of their application, can only be appreciated by those who have been in the habit of personal intercourse with him. But the size of the book is an objection with many, and a cloud of authorities will sometimes obscure the most luminous arrangement.

This little work does not aspire to compete with either of the above learned performances, but merely to supply a want, felt by many, of a plain and brief summary of the principal practical points relating to bills and notes, supported by a reference to the leading or latest authorities. In many cases the reader will, however, find the law laid down in the very words of the judgment, a plan which the Author has been induced to adopt, partly that those who may not have ready access to the authorities may be satisfied that the law is correctly stated; and partly because he distrusted his own ability to enunciate, on so complicated a subject, a general rule, neither too narrow nor too wide, beset, as almost all such general rules now are, with numerous qualifications and exceptions. No pains have been spared to render the subject intelligible. How far the book is likely to be useful in practice, it is for others to determine.

INNER TEMPLE,

16th April, 1829.

JOHN BARNARD BYLES.