Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 15.pdf/93

 62

Tlic Green Bag. MARTIN VS. HARRINGTON. 73 Vt., 193.

(Holding that tin- Homestead Act protects the husband, as well as the wife and children; and that the husband's sole deed of the homestead is void, and not rendered effective by the subsequent death of the wife leaving him witho.ut children.)

BY HALE K. DARLING. I. The strenuous jades of past decades were ducked for their loquacity, But nowadays, the statute says they have a man's capacity To hold their own, sole and alone, sue and be sued as men can be, Trades consummate, own real estate, and act as independently As e'er they can; and now a man has hardly an immunity That women folk cannot invoke with just as much impunity. II. Indeed, so far has man lost pas, that now he cannot grant away By his sole act, the homestead tract, and, shou-ld he try, the jurists say The deed employed is null and void, and ne'er becomes of force or weight, E'en should the wife depart this life, leaving no children desolate. To head of house, as "well as spouse, protection must extended be,— The court well savs that in these davs he often needs it more than she.

BLOCKADES. BY LAWRENCE IRWELL. A TERRITORY is said to be blockaded when access to or egress from its sea ports is prevented by the naval forces of another State. When a State, for purposes of its own, fiscal or hygienic, declares that certain of its own ports shall be closed against foreign vessels, that decree must be respected by other States to whose notice it is duly brought, provided that those ports are really under the control of the executive of that State. But that is not a blockade; it is a mere closure of ports which any govern ment, in virtue of its inherent sovereignty within the borders of its own territory, is quite entitled to announce. Blockade is es sentially a war measure. When the Presi

dent, in 1861, proclaimed that a forcible blockade of the Southern States vould be forthwith instituted, England and France immediately declared their neutrality, and al though that meant that they recognized the Confederates as belligerents, not as rebels, their action was unobjectionable, because when the Northern States issued the procla mation, they by implication admitted that they were engaged in war, and not merely in the suppression of a rebellion. In recent times, however, recourse has been had to what has been termed "pacific blockade"; thus the coasts of Greece were blockaded in 1827 by the English, French and Russian squadrons, although all three powers pro-