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238 238 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. pie, this uncertainty should have rendered both notes non-negotiable. When the time of maturity depends on extraneous facts, and cannot be ascertained from the face of the note, difficulties arise which are readily apparent. But these difficulties have had little or no weight in the courts of America and England. Such common instruments as demand notes are open to objection on this ground. Analogous to the Michigan cases under discussion is a series of decisions, beginning with Carlon v. Kenealy^ 12 M. & W. 139, and including the recent cases of Merrill , Hurley, 62 N. W. Rep. 958 (S. Dak.), and Stark v. Olsen, 63 N. W. Rep. 37 (Neb.), which establish that where the principal or interest of a note is made payable in instalments, with a provision that the face of the note shall become due in case of default in the payment of any instalment, the note is not rendered non negotiable. It would seem, therefore, to be too late to object to a note on the ground that inspection will not reveal whether or not if is overdue. The doctrine that it is suf- ficient if the instrument is payable at a time that must certainly come, is now firmly established in our law. There is, to be sure, one class of cases, of which Smith v. Marland, 59 Iowa, 645, is an example, that seem in reality inconsistent with this. Rut the doctrine is not expressly repudiated, for the courts rest their decisions on the ground of uncer- tainty in the amount payable on the notes. Uncertainty of this sort is as fatal to negotiability to day as ever, notwithstanding the recognition of notes providing for payment of attorney's fees, cost of collection, etc. Those cases where the additional promise is merely to facilitate collec- tion go as far as is justifiable. Although Brooke v. Strut/iers, sicpra, has been criticised as resting on narrow grounds, and as being at variance with modern business methods,, it seems to have been an entirely cor- rect decision under the present state of the law. Common Law Pleading. — "And, so long as written pleadings remain, the best masters of the art will be they who can inform the apparent license of the new system with that spirit of exactness and self-restraint which flows from a knowledge of the old." Thus, in his address to the American Bar Association at Saratoga last summer, Sir Montague Cracken- thorpe, Q. C, spoke with reference to the utility of the study of common law pleading, swept away in the wave of legal reform, which resulted in the English Judicature Act of 1873. Since that time the matchless pre- cision of the old system, the growth of centuries of legal experience, has been replaced by a looseness of which the chief effect is to put a pre- mium on ignorance and sloth. Common law pleading was the mill of justice in which an undefined, obscure mass of fact was ground down to clear and distinct issues. All the parts of this admirable machinery, each logically developed to this single end, worked in harmony to its accomplishment. In consequence, the court could ascertain the steps of law by reference to an intelligible record, the counsel each knew exactly what he must stand ready to prove, and the jury were required to hear evidence only on the definite issue of fact reached. In the hands of those who understood it, the system was infallible in attaining the purpose for which it existed. If all who brought causes to trial had possessed a proper acquaintance with this branch of law and a reasonable mental alertness, it would never have been hinted that plead- ing was a means of turning the decision of a question from " the very