Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 10.djvu/542

516 injure the subordinates when the fact is well known that nothing is so demoralizing as the lack of it. Now, to accomplish all this, it has been found necessary to compel both sides to live up to their engagements, and this is the object of the Revised Statutes.

The court, however, lays down as a general test that any form of " servitude, which was knowingly and willingly entered into," is not an " involuntary servitude " within the meaning of the Amendment. Such contracts of service may be void on grounds of public policy, or there may be no means of enforcing them. Assent to this proposition may not be readily given. In the Slaughter House Cases, 16 Wall. 36, 89, Mr. Justice Miller expressed the opinion that the words " involuntary servitude " were inserted lest it might be possible to defeat the real scope of the Amendment by the contention that slavery had come to mean African slavery as it had existed in this country. He cites, as examples of the abuses aimed at, the long terms of apprenticeship common in the West Indies, and the condition of serfdom. As the Amendment provides that slavery shall not exist in this country, surely a man cannot sell himself into slavery. Were not the forms of servitude the Amendment was intended to cover meant to be dealt with in exactly the same manner as slavery? The words " slavery" and" involuntary servitude "are coupled together. Is it not fair to say that it was the status of "involuntary servitude," no matter when it became involuntary, that was deemed pernicious, and not merely the method of its creation? There seems to be much to be said for the view taken by Mr. Justice Harlan in his dissenting opinion, that the word "involuntary " is not to be separated from the word " servitude," and its force confined to the inception of the service.

.- It is said in the case of The Third National Bank v. Lange, 51 Md. 138, that a note payable on its face to the order of A B, trustee, is not "within the c of paper known as commercial paper." If this expression means no more than that a purchaser of such paper must always take it with notice that the payee held it in trust, so that the purchaser will take the risk of get- ting no beneficial interest in the note in case the trustee has transferred wrongfully, and that therefore such paper will not pass so freely from hand to hand as ordinary bills and notes, the language of the court is entirely correct. If the assertion, on the other hand, is that such paper is not negotiable, or that it is subject to the equities existing between the original parties in the hands of all subsequent holders, the court was clearly in error. This appears from the recent well considered case of Fox v. Citizens Bank & Trust Co., 37 S. W. Rep. 1102 (Tenn.). In that case a trustee sold to the plaintiff certain lots of land, with the con- sent of the beneficial owners, and took the plaintiff's notes payable to him as trustee, which he discounted at the defendant bank. It turned out afterwards that the trustee was unable to convey the land sold, so that the consideration for the notes wholly failed; but of this defendant had no notice. The plaintiff then sought for an injunction to restrain defendant from suing on the notes, but this the court properly refused to grant. Whatever might be the bank's liability to the cestui que trust of the payee in case he had committed a breach of trust in transferring to the bank. the payee has clearly power to pass the legal title in the note, and the bank is entitled to hold it as free from any equities between previous