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The Green Bag

dence properly bearing upon the case and evidence irrelevant to the facts and therefore inadmissible. It would not be hard, we fancy, to show that a man's common law right to a trial by his peers signifies that his rights are rather to be upheld by his being tried by men of a higher than of a lower mental type. We spoke in this department last month of the special demands made upon the intelligence of the jury by expert testi mony, and we would emphasize at this time the conviction that the whole jury system must stand or fall by the stan dard of intelligence required of jurors.

THE RIGHTS OF A DOMESTIC ANIMAL The common law vests in a reputable dog the right of going and coming where he listeth, without charging his master for trespass. Chunot v. Larsen, 43 Wis. 543. The English Court of Appeal, in Higgins v. Searle, decided Feb. 8, seems to have declared a similar principle when it held that the owner of a pig or any other naturally harm less animal is not liable for an accident due to its presence in the highway. The other day a motor car was proceeding quietly on its way through a New England village, when suddenly a chicken, pursued by a cat, crossed the road, scaring a little pony coming in the opposite direction driven by two little girls, one of whom carried a poodle dog in her lap. The poodle, spying the cat, in a second had jumped out of the ponycart, and the driver of the automobile, in order to avoid running over the poodle, had to stop the machine in the middle of the road. A collie belonging to a woman in the motor car then leapt out before she could detain it and chased the poodle. The little girls had now lost control of the pony, and the chauffeur, seeing a runaway approaching, was eager to avoid a collision, so he started the machine, turning it sharply toward the gutter, but beholding the two dogs fighting there and the cat bristling on the opposite side of the road, he steered toward a stone wall over which the chicken was trying to escape, at which sight he so lost his nerve as to let the machine crash at full speed into the wall, where it was totally demolished. The owner of the auto

mobile then brought suit for damages against the owner of the chicken, claiming that it was entirely responsible for the accident. The Court, in giving judgment, said:— "There can be no possible doubt as to the chicken having been the proximate cause of the accident. For had the chicken not crossed the road, the cat would not have scared the pony; had the pony not been scared, the poodle could not have got out of the pony cart; had the poodle not left the pony cart, the automobile would not have stopped; had the automobile not stopped, the collie and the poodle would not have been in the gutter; had the collie and poodle not been in the gutter, the cat would not have hung round to see things through; had the cat not remained on the scene, the chicken would not have been trying to scale the wall; and had the chicken not been trying to scale the wall, the chauffeur would have kept his nerve and have saved the machine from accident. "Yet though the chicken caused the acci dent, the chicken's act was not in itself violent or dangerous. This chicken would doubtless have made a tender broiler; it was gentle and inoffensive, and not being ferae naturae its destruction of the automobile was uncon scious and free from malice. Therefore, the chicken not having exceeded its common law rights, this action cannot be maintained, and judgment must be entered for the defendant."

JUDICIAL EFFICIENCY HAS NOT ATTAINED ITS MAXIMUM Judge William L. Putnam of the United States Circuit Court in an ad dress at Boston a few weeks ago, deplored the unfortunate fact that we do not, as a rule, make our judgeships remunerative enough to at tract the best lawyers, and said that ordinarily this country gets for judges and prosecuting officers by no means the best nor the ablest men. When our Chief Justices receive sal aries of only $2000 in Oregon, $2500 in Nebraska, and $3000 in Arizona and twelve other states, is it strange that the administration of justice is no more efficient? Comparatively small salaries