Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 1.djvu/334

   Court at Washington as a final court of appeal from all tribunals, state and federal.

But although the Civil War has decided, more effectively than any judicial opinion, that we are a nation, and the amendments growing out of that great epoch have provided that citizenship in the nation shall not depend on race or color, and that there shall be no discrimination between citizens by a State, it has not yet been decided or provided that the independence as to local matters, which forms the strongest bulwark against that disintegration so often predicted, has ceased, and that the State in the administration of its laws is to be subjected to the surveillance of the national courts. And it is to be deplored that the Supreme Court of the United States, upon which chiefly rests the responsibility for preserving the proper relation of dependence and independence between things national and things local, should have adopted a course which may tend to countenance such an idea.

William H. Dunbar.

HE question for discussion is whether a debtor can pledge his property so as to indemnify his surety, without giving the creditor a preferred claim on the indemnity fund. In such a case it is not contemplated that the surety shall pay the debt out of the security in the first instance, but if through default of his principal he should be obliged to pay out of his own property, it is intended that he shall have recourse to the fund for reimbursement. One must distinguish carefully between three classes of cases: first, those in which the security is given primarily for the better protection of the debt; second, those in which the surety has the power, though not the duty, to apply the security in discharge of the debt; third, those in which the security is given merely for the purpose of indemnity. In the first class there can be no question that the creditor has the rights of any cestui que