Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 8.djvu/322

306 306 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. The complaint that D has taken the land is not answered by the plea that he intends to keep it only ninety-nine years. This plea would disclaim any temporary or provisional arrangement rendered inevitable or reasonably necessary by circumstances. And if the question were, not whether D has taken the land, but whether he intends to keep it an unconstitutional length of time, it would be as difficult to hold that A would not be deprived of his property by taking it from him for a term of ninety-nine years, as to hold that he would not be deprived of his liberty by imprisonment for the same term. So far as the legality of his deprivation is concerned, he might as well be ousted by a perpetual lease as by one which leaves him a remainder so distant that, in the ordinary course of nature, for the usual purposes of ownership, the farm that was his will never be his again. When A, B and C are partners in the business of buying and carrying on another farm (No. 2), they are joint principals, and by fair implication, in the absence of express stipulation, each makes the others his agents for doing the joint business in the usual way, within the limits prescribed by the character of their enterprise. If B and C can bind A by an exchange of hay for a mowing- machine, and cannot bind him by an exchange of the farm for a saw-mill, it is because in the former case, by the exchange, the partnership business is carried on by B and C acting as principals for themselves and as agents for A, and in the latter case (aside from the law of real estate conveyance), the partnership business is not carried on, and therefore B and C are not exercising the power of agency given them by A. In their dual capacity, as principals, and as agents of A, they can do for the firm whatever is customary and necessary for the execution of the partnership contract, and the accomplishment of its object.^ If buying farms and selling them, or letting them for ninety-nine years, had been the business of the firm and the object of their contract, the power of agency would have been very different from that given by the formation of a partnership for the ownership, cultivation and use of Farm No. 2? As the general agency of B and C in carrying on Farm No. i for A as sole principal is not executed by their con- veyance of the whole title, or a term of ninety-nine years, or a life estate, transferring A's business from him to another principal, 1 Story, Partnership, §§ loi, 102, 111-114; i Lindley, Partnership, 236 ; Kimbro V. Bullitt, 22 How. 256, 264-268. 2 Anderson v. Tompkins, i Brock. 456, 460; Chester v. Dickerson, 54 N. Y. i.