Page:Federal Reporter, 1st Series, Volume 9.djvu/166

 ALBX4NDBR V. GALT. 151 �table they had the right to make good the promise that he should be profected. It is true that if: Patterson & Co. had been adjudged bankrupts within three months after the transfer of this note, their assignees in bankruptcy could have attacked this transfer as a prefer- ence contrary to the express provisions of the bankrupt law then in force, and perhaps set it aside. But the provisions of the bankrupt lOsW,. prohibiting, preferential payments and conveyances, Was not invokied in apt time, and this transaction is to be considered as if no bankrupt law had ever existed. �Complainants have cited a large number of decisions by the lowa courts upon the statute of that- state regulating assignments mth preferences, ; and insist that as the statute of Illinois, in regard to tiopied frbm the iowa statute, these decisions should be dofemed eon- trolling. There Would seem to be no doubt that the doctrine bf those c^ses, is that if an insolvent debtor makes severai preferential pay- meitts to creditprs, or conveyances of property in p3,ynient of debts, in such sequence to each other, and to an assignment in trust for the tenefit of creditors, that they are all to be deemed as essentially one transaction, the preference will be sei aside as being in violation of the spirit of these statutes. Lampson v. Arnold, 19 Iowa, 480. And in this class of cases it bas been held that the voluntary assignee can set aside the preference and recover the property transferred or -money paid. These authorities only go to the point that if the trans- fer of this note to defendant was so intimately related to the assign- ment to Champion that they could be held to be one transaction. Champion could have held the note as against defendant. But when this court set the assignaient to Champion aside, it did not place plaintiffs in his shoes as against defendant; that is, it doea not fol- low, because Champion might have attacked this transfer as a prefer- ence, that, therefore, the plaintiffs can do so. They do not succeed to his rights of action under the Illinois statute, if he had any, but must rest upon. their rights upder the bankrupt law, �This, then, being at most only a preferential payment, made more than three inonths before bankruptcy, cannot be set aside in favor of plaintiffs. Defendant not guilty. ■ ��� �
 * oluntary assignments, approved May 22, 1877, was substantially