on your house property. Again the King's Bench must be invoked, and asked to hold, as it does hold, that it is neither unreasonable nor illegal that a man should have two rights of appeal in a matter touching his pocket to an indefinite extent. There the matter rests for the present; but it is possible that the protracted intellectual pleasures of the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords still lie before the landlord.

In another case with similar circumstances (Adams v. Tuer [1923] W. N. 278) a Rural District Council, having served the usual notice and then done the work itself, sued for 3421. expenses incurred. The justices found that the amount charged for labour was excessive, that all the work charged for was not done, and that part of the work was not necessary; and they fixed 250l. as a proper sum to cover the expenses. Again the Council contended that the justices had no power to inquire into the reasonableness of the amount, and that their duty apparently was to award either the whole amount or nothing at all; and again the house-owner, already admittedly overcharged 1007., is haled before the King's Bench to have it settled whether the overcharge is or is not in the best interests of justice. The King's Bench had no difficulty in answering the question. Such are the problems of logic and casuistry which the disjecta membra of hasty administrative legislation constantly force on our Courts.

Compensation for war losses has been a much-agitated question, and it is impossible to sympathise with all those who make claims against the public for pecuniary loss incurred through Government interference at a time when all the well-affected were losing something either in person or estate. But some of the distinctions which have been drawn between admissible and inadmissible claims are not easy to follow, and appear to work serious injustice in not a few cases. The subject is for the most part governed by the Indemnity Act, 1920, which, as is well known, indemnifies servants of the Crown for acts done to the detriment of individuals in the emergency of war conditions. In such cases, the person aggrieved cannot pursue his ordinary remedy at law, but must apply for compensation to a special tribunal set up by the Act. Further, there are many cases in which, owing

to the peculiarities of our Crown law, the person damnified would have no legal recourse against the Government; in such circumstances the Indemnity Act provides that the claim shall be considered according to certain principles laid down in Part II of the Schedule of the Statute. One of these principles is that a claim can be entertained only for direct loss . . . suffered by the claimant by reason of direct and particular interference with his business.' The object is to prevent claims for all kinds of remote and speculative damage which might be alleged to flow from Departmental interference; and it is clear that some limitation of this kind is necessary to restrain frivolous, vexatious, and grasping claims. But what is 'direct' damage? It threatens to become restricted to such narrow limits that quite honest and reasonable claims fail on purely technical grounds. A company, during the war, has chartered a ship for Mediterranean trade. The ship is about to sail for Egypt with a full outward and return cargo, when it is ordered by the Shipping Controller to proceed to Cuba and bring a cargo of sugar to England. The loss to the company as a result of this order is estimated at 20,000l. Is this direct damage? The House of Lords says not (Moss S.S. Co. v. Board of Trade [1923] A. C. 133); and probably, in the special circumstances of the case, the result is not unjust, though the dissent of two members of the House and the extraordinarily different reasons given by the other three will prove a source of embarrassment whenever the point rises again. Indeed, difficulty has already been caused; and in a later case (Black v. Admiralty Commissioners [1924] 1 K. B. 661) a meritorious claim seems to have failed through the vagueness of the Indemnity Act. In May 1916, B., a steam-trawler owner, ordered from a firm of ship-builders eight trawlers intended to be used by him in his business. They were to be delivered on specified dates in 1917 and 1918; but in October 1916, before the building had begun, the Admiralty exercised its powers under D.O.R.A. and ordered the builders to abandon any work for private owners and build for the Admiralty instead. B. therefore-doubtless for excellent public reasons-must go without his ships. But he must have new ships sooner or later if his business is not to Vol. 244.—No. 483.

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perish. If he gets them in 1917 or 1918, they will cost him 39,000l. more than in 1916, when he originally ordered them. Actually, he could not have bought them at all or got them built till 1919, when they would have cost him 66,000l. more than in 1916. Has he not suffered a 'direct' loss through the interference of the Admiralty, which was quite well aware when it issued its order to the builders that they were under contract to build trawlers for B.? The Court of Appeal has decided that B. cannot maintain his claim, and he must get his ships built at whatever fancy price the present conditions of the market may demand. He must content himself with the reflexion that the loss of 66,000l. is merely indirect,' and we hope that he may have sufficient philosophy to persuade himself that it is not really a loss at all.

A considerable amount of inconvenience and unnecessary litigation has been caused by the reshuffling of Departments and Ministries since the war. Thus the Shipping Controller's rights and liabilities have passed to the Board of Trade, the Board of Trade has in some important matters been supplanted by the Ministry of Transport, and under the very complicated provisions of the enactments relating to the Irish Free State a number of Departmental functions have been transferred to the Government of that Dominion. Each Department is anxious, it need hardly be said, to shift its responsibility elsewhere; and the result often is that a litigant has to spend a great deal of money in determining which particular Department (if any) he can sue for an admittedly substantial claim. Each Department is ready if necessary to appeal as far as the House of Lords in order to disclaim its responsibility, and thus the unhappy litigant may be involved in months or even years of preliminary law-suits before he can even begin to prosecute his claim. Thus in 1917 and 1918 an Irish railway company enters into an agreement with the Board of Trade by which the company promises to take up certain rails and sleepers and transfer them to the Board; the Board promises in return to pay for the cost of replacing the rails and sleepers, of constructing a double instead of a single line, and of making consequential alterations to certain stations. The company carries out its part of the bargain; six years later it is still attempting to find

out which part of the mystical body of the Crown is prepared to keep faith with it. The Board of Trade says its liabilities have passed to the Ministry of Transport: the Ministry of Transport refers the plaintiff to the Government of the Irish Free State. Mr Justice Rowlatt holds that the Ministry of Transport is liable: the Court of Appeal reversed his decision; and the House of Lords, after the usual interval of time, has recently reversed the Court of Appeal. Now that the final tribunal has delivered itself, the company (if it is not by this time in liquidation) has the satisfaction of knowing that it can at last proceed to sue somebody.

It is fresh in the memory of the public that various Ministries set up during the war were empowered to grant licences for numerous purposes, such as export, import, and distribution of goods, and transactions concerning ships. Both in morality and in law the duty of a person entrusted with the power of granting licences is solely to exercise his judicial discretion on the merits of each application. But it occurred to the Food Ministry, which was invested with large powers in this respect, that this was an admirable opportunity for turning a dishonest penny for the public revenue. It proceeded to charge considerable sums for granting its licences. If this were done by an official for his private gain, it would, of course, amount to the grossest corruption; and the irregularity of the procedure was not altered by the fact that it was not an individual, but the public, which took the ill-gotten profit. Nor was the imposition improved in essence, though given a hypocritical exterior, by being disguised under the semblance of a voluntary agreement. Thus, in the test case (Attorney-General v. Wilts United Dairies, Ltd. [1922] 38 T. L. R. 781), a company was refused a licence by the Food Controller to import milk and to deal in milk products unless and until it had 'agreed' to pay the Food Controller a toll of 2d. per gallon on the milk imported. The money was paid, but, in the words of Lord Justice Bankes in another case, paid 'grudgingly and of necessity, but without open protest, because protest was felt to be useless.' It was, in fact, according to any plain use of language, paid under compulsion; and money so paid can be recovered at law. The Dairy Company's claim to recover this blood-money

was contested as far as the House of Lords. The House was not moved by pathetic appeals from the AttorneyGeneral that officials should not be 'interfered with' in the beneficent discharge of their duties. It was held that the imposition was illegal and contrary to as fundamental a constitutional document as the Bill of Rights, inasmuch as it amounted to taxation imposed on the subject without the authority of Parliament. This case was decided in 1922. Now, the Shipping Controller had followed the example of his colleague, and had exacted very large sums for the issue of licences to sell British ships to foreign purchasers. In 1923, the Court of Appeal had clearly indicated that the exaction of such sums was equally illegal in regard to ships as in regard to milk (Marshall Shipping Co. v. Board of Trade [1923] 2 K. B. 343); but this was only an opinion, not a decision, since the case in which it was given, like so many others, was merely part of the preliminary skirmish as to which Department the claimant was to sue. In the next case (Brocklebank v. The King [1924] 1 K. B. 647 and 40 T. L. R. 869), the Crown boldly takes advantage of its own wrongdoing and teaches us for the first time that the Sovereign is the only person exempted from the familiar principle, nemo suam turpitudinem allegans est audiendus. The ship-owners here obtained from the Shipping Controller in November and December 1919 (and therefore no longer during actual war conditions) a licence to sell one of their obsolete ships to an Italian firm; but only on condition of paying 35,000l. to the Ministry of Shipping, being 15 per cent. of the sale price. They now sue for the recovery of this money, on the authority of the principle laid down by the House of Lords in the Wilts Dairy Case. It must be noted that an action to recover money exacted under compulsion is a form of action in contract; and it is specially provided by the Indemnity Act, 1920, that actions in contract, arising out of acts done during the war, continue to be maintainable against the Crown, by way of Petition of Right, if brought within a certain time. But the Crown is ready for all emergencies. It says: You must not sue us in contract, because we have committed a civil wrong: the exaction of money by compulsion, sometimes vulgarly known as blackmail, is as much a tort as libel or assault or trespass: