Page:Train - Tutt and Mr Tutt (Scribner, 1922).djvu/199

 don't need to go back farther than Chief Justice Marshall so far as I am concerned."

Tutt bowed.

"It is an established doctrine of the common law both of England and America that it is wholly proper for one to keep a domestic animal for his use, pleasure or protection, until, as Dykeman, J., says in Muller vs. McKesson, 10 Hun., 45, 'some vicious propensity is developed and brought out to the knowledge of the owner.' Up to that time the man who keeps a dog or other animal cannot be charged with liability for his acts. This has always been the law.

"In the twenty-first chapter of Exodus at the twenty-eighth verse it is written: 'If an ox gore a man or a woman, that they die; then the ox shall be surely stoned, and his flesh shall not be eaten; but the owner of the ox shall be quit. But if the ox were wont to push with his horn in time past, and it hath been testified to his owner, and he hath not kept him in, but that he hath killed a man or a woman; the ox shall be stoned, and his owner also shall be put to death.'

"In the old English case of Smith vs. Pehal, 2 Strange, 1264, it was said by the court: 'If a dog has once bit a man, and the owner having notice thereof keeps the dog, and lets him go about or lie at his door, an action will lie against him at the