infant partner, his acts and contracts are of course voidable; but if, on arriving at full age, the infant does not disaffirm the partnership, and give notice of it to those with whom the partnership have had dealings, he will be responsible for subsequent debts contracted on the credit of the partnership. The ground of the rule is, that the infant acted as partner during his infancy, and when he comes of age he neglects to inform *69 the world that he is not a partner, and suffers it to deal under mistake and delusion. Having thus far collected and reviewed the general principles which constitute the law of partnership, and followed those principles into their practical details, the plan of these lectures will not permit me to go more minutely into the subject, or to consider the legal and equitable remedies which exist between partners, and between them and third persons, in relation to the various rights and duties which belong to the association. The questions arising upon those remedies, and particularly in respect to the settlement of the partnership estate, in the various cases of dissolution, and especially of dissolution by bankruptcy, are subtle and numerous. The decrees in equity under this head abound with minute and refined distinctions, and they form a comprehensive and very complicated part of this branch of the commercial law.b Goode v. Harrison, 5 Barnw. & Ald. 147. ▸ Among those English treatises which enter more at large on the law of partnership, I would refer the student to a valuable summary of the law of partners, in the third volume of Mr. Chitty's large treatise on the Laws of Commerce and Manufactures, and the Contracts relating thereto; and, more especially, to the American edition of Mr. Gow's practical treatise on the Law of Partnership, from which I have derived great assistance. The American editor, Mr. Ingraham, has enriched the work with a series of learned notes, in which the American cases are diligently collected, and the force and application of them ably considered; and I think the book is to be preferred to the more recent treatise of Mr. Carey, which has nothing in particular to recommend it, except it be the addition of new cases, arising since the publication of Mr. Gow. Since the third edition of this work, a new treatise on the Law of Partnership, by Mr. Collyer, appeared, with notes of American cases by Mr. Phillips and Mr. Pickering, of Boston. Commentaries on the Law of Partnership, by Mr. Justice Story, have also been published since the fourth edition. The two last are works of great merit, and the latter pre-eminently so, and they have stated fully the principles and distinctions, and given the learning and cases which belong to the subject. An able treatise on the Law of Partnership, Railway, and other Joint Stock Companies, by Andrew Bissel, was published at London, in 1847. Mon. Evening Mearch 257/62. LECTURE XLIV. OF NEGOTIABLE PAPER. (1.) Of the history of bills and notes. It is the general opinion, that the commerce of the⚫ ancients was carried on without the use of bills of exchange, and there is no vestige of them in the Roman law. A passage in the Pandects" shows it to have been the practice with the creditor who lent money on bottomry, or respondentia, to a foreign merchant, to send his slave to receive the loan, with maritime interest, on the arrival of the vessel at the foreign port. This certainly would not have been necessary, says Pothier, if bills of exchange had been in use. But, however the fact may have been with the Romans, it would seem, from a passage in one of the pleadings of Isocrates, that bills of exchange were sometimes resorted to at Athens, as a safe expedient to shift funds from one coun*72 try to another. Bills of exchange are of such indispensable use in the remittance of the value of Dig. 22. 2. 4. 1. Traité du Con. de Change, No. 6. See the pleading of Isocrates, entitled Trapeziticus. (Isocratis Scripta omnia, edit. H. Wolfius, Basle, 1587.) In that interesting forensic argument which Isocrates puts into the mouth of a son of Sopæus, the governor of a province of Pontus, in his suit against Pasion, an Athenian banker, for the grossest breach of trust, it is stated, that the son, wishing to receive a large sum of money from his father, applied to Stratocles, who was about to sail from Athens to Pontus, to leave his money, and take a draft upon his father money between distant places, without risk and expense, that foreign commerce cannot conveniently be carried on without them. They grew into use on the coasts of the Mediterranean, in the fourteenth century." As they serve the purposes of cash, and facilitate commerce, and are the visible representatives of large masses of property, they may truly be said to enlarge the capital stock of wealth in circulation, as well as increase the trade of the country. Promissory notes are governed by the rules that apply to bills. The statute of 3d and 4th Anne, made promissory notes payable to a person, and to his order, or bearer, negotiable like inland bills, according to the custom of merchants, and by the statutes of 9 and 10 for the amount. This, said the orator, was deemed a great advantage to the young man, for it saved him the risk of remittance from Pontus, over a sea covered with Lacedæmonian pirates. It is added, that Stratocles was so cautious as to take security from Pasion for the money advanced upon the bill, and to whom he might have recourse if the governor of Pontus should not honour the draft, and the young Pontian should fail. In 1394, the city of Barcelona, by ordinance, regulated the acceptance of bills of exchange; and the use of them is said to have been introduced into western Europe by the Lombard merchants, in the thirteenth century. Bills of exchange are mentioned in a passage of the Jurist Baldus, of the date of 1328. Hallam's Introduction to the Literature of Europe, vol. i. 68. M. Boucher received from M. Legou Deflaix, a native of India, a memoir, showing that bills of exchange were known in India from the most high antiquity. But the ordinance of Barcelona is, perhaps, the earliest authentic document in the middle ages of the establishment and general currency of bills of ex. change. (Consulat de la Mer, par Boucher, tome i. 614. 620.) The first bank of exchange and deposit in Europe was established at Barcelona, in 1401, and it was made to accommodate foreigners as well as citizens. 1 Prescott's Ferdinand and Isabella, Int. p. 112. M. Merlin says, the edict of Louis XI., of 1462, is the earliest French edict on the subject; and he attributes the invention of bills of exchange to the Jews, when they retired from France to Lombardy. .The Italians, and merchants of Amsterdam, first established the use of them in France. Repertoire de Jurisprudence, tit. Lettre et Billet de Change, sec. 2. In England, reference was made, in the statute of 5 Rich. II. c. 2, to the drawing of foreign bills. This was in the year 1381. Wm. III. c. 17, and 3 and 4 Anne, inland bills are put upon the footing of foreign bills, except that no protest is requisite. These statutes have been generally adopted in this country, either formally or in effect, and promissory notes are every where negotiable. By the N. Y. Revised Statutes, vol. i. 768. sec. 1-6, promissory notes payable in money to any person, or to the order of any person, or to bearer, are negotiable in like manner as inland bills of exchange, according to the custom of merchants. The payee and endorsee of every such note, payable to them or their order, and the holder of every such note, payable to bearer, may sue thereon in like manner as in cases of inland bills of exchange. If such notes are made payable to the order of the maker, or to the order of a fictitious person, and are negotiated by the maker, they have the same effect and validity as if made payable to bearer. Promissory notes are negotiable throughout the Union, and the endorsee can sue in his own name. Notes, negotiable where made, are negotiable every where. This is so held in England and in this country, under the statute of 3 and 4 Anne, and its substitute. Mylne v. Graham, 1 Barnw. & Cress. 192. Hatcher v. M'Morine, 4 Dev. N. C. Rep. 122. So, if a note or debt be assigned or endorsed abroad, and be suable in the name of the assignee by the law of the country where it was assigned or endorsed, it would seem to be the better opinion in England, that the assignee might sue there in his own name, upon the assignment, as creating a right of action in him, and which it does upon the application of the doctrine of the lex loci contractus. Innes v. Dunlop, 8 Term, 595. O'Callaghan v. Thomond, 3 Taunton, 82. In Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, Ohio, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Missis sippi, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, and most of the states, the endorsee has all the privileges of an endorsee under the law merchant. But in NewJersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky and Indiana, his rights, under the law merchant, are to be taken with some qualification. See Griffith's Law Register, passim. 1 Miner's Alabama Rep. 5. 296. Revised Statutes of North Carolina, 1837, vol. i. 93. Revised Statutes of Vermont, 1839, 336. Revised Code of Mississippi, 1822, 464. In Georgia, notice to the endorser of non-payment of a promissory note by the maker is declared to be unnecessary, and every such endorser is held to be bound as security, and in that character may require the holder to proceed against the maker. Hotchkiss's Code of Laws, p. 441. Notes or bills discounted at a bank, or deposited for collection, are placed by statute in Pennsylvania on the footing of foreign bills of exchange as to payment and remedy. Purdon's Dig. 108. As the English statute has not been adopted in Virginia, the last assignee of a promissory note cannot maintain an action against a remote endorser, there being neither consideration nor privity. Dunlop v. Harris, 5 Call, 16. In |