Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 32.djvu/176

140 I40 HARVARD LAW REVIEW notice that this result does not follow necessarily from the statute alone, but arises from the joint operation of the statute and the common law. If a person has a right and several remedies, the bar of one remedy is not the discharge of all the others.^^ Under American statutes, as under the Statute of James I, there may be some remedies which are not expressly affected by the terms of the statute. But when the statute extinguishes the remedy in ejectment to recover possession, the common law and also equity say that the possession shall not be questioned by the former owner in any other manner, either by self-help, by action of trespass, or by a bill in equity. The earlier statutes of limitation did not mention bills in equity as subject to the bar; but never- theless they were followed in equity as well as at law on the prin- ciple of analogy, and on the principle that where a thing is forbidden by law in one form it shall not be done in another.^ The judicature by its own ruHngs has thus imposed limitations, guiding itself by the policy of the statute to quiet the possessory title. As the Wisconsin Supreme Court has pointed out,^ it would be a strange anomaly to hold that the law which bars the owner from recovering possession or the use of the land itself, after he has acquiesced in a usurped ownership by another for twenty years, should yet leave him at hberty to assert title in other ways as by action of trespass for mesne profits, by extra-judicial re-entry or by suit in equity to quiet title, for partition or for an accounting. It seems a necessary consequence of the policy underlying the limitation acts that one should be considered to have no right or title when the most essential incident or legal consequence of title, the right to recover possession, is barred. Hopeless confusion would result from the recognition of any such anomalous titles, without right of possession, surviving the statute. The maxim that where there is a right there is a remedy may be turned about e converso, so that where there is no remedy there is no right. The only cloud on the possessor's title is the true owner's right to recover possession 21 Hunt V. Bum, 2 Salk. 421, 422 (1702). ^ Humbert v. Trinity Church, 24 Wend. (N. Y.) 587 (1840); Ehnendorf v. Taylor, 10 Wheat. (U. S.) 152, 174 (1825); Chapin v. Freeland, 142 Mass. 383, 8 N. E. 128 (1886); Smith V. Clark, 248 HI. 255, 258, 93 N. E. 727 (1911); Wood v. Mich., etc. R. Co., 90 Mich. 212, 51 N. W. 363 (1892); Chohnondeley v. Clinton, 2 J. & W. 139, 155 (1820); Re Jolly, [1900] 2 Ch. 616.
 * Steinberg v. Salzman, 139 Wis. 118, 124, 120 N. W, 1008 (1909)..