Page:United States Reports, Volume 257.djvu/102

Rh 10. Taking the section as a whole, it classes bank notes, bills, or evidences of indebtedness circulating as money, and shares in an incorporated company together, and makes them subject to be "taken and sold as goods and chattels", or to be "applied to the payment of the execution". At common law, choses in action were not subject to levy as personal property. Here the legislative purpose appears to be to treat the written evidences of the choses in action circulating as money as in themselves capable of manual seizure by the execution officer, and, in appropriate causes, of actual application as money on the execution debt. The joining of shares of stock in this section with such choses in action indicates that the shares are to be regarded as in pari materia, and to be dealt with, as nearly as may be, in like manner.

The elaborate and specific provision for a levy upon corporate stock of § 3467 of the Mississippi Code of 1892, which succeeded the Code of 1871, was, and was evidently intended to be, a departure from, and a substantial amendment of § 849 in this respect. Under the later code, provision for levy on bank notes, bills and other evidences of indebtedness is separated from that prescribing the levy on shares of stock. Shares of stock are no longer dealt with expressly as "goods and chattels". The officers of the corporation are no longer required to give a "certificate" of the number of shares held by the judgment debtor to the levying officer, but are to make a statement in writing.

The procedure provided in § 849, in our view, was intended to furnish to the levying officer a certificate of the shares of the defendant which the officer could manually take and offer for sale as the shares, and which when endorsed by the officer with a record of his proceedings and sale would work an assignment of the shares to the purchaser "as if regularly assigned to him by defendant," i. e., by the usual transfer of a certificate. If we are right