operate in the same way, on the same estate at the same time. Both demand the reservation of a fixed amount from a legacy or distributive share before it can properly become the property of the legatee or distributee. The right of inheritance and the right to take under a will are privileges created by law and can be made subject to whatever conditions the legislatures, both federal and state, having jurisdiction over the property of the decedent, may seek to impose. The jurisdiction of the federal government is co-ordinate with that of the state government and neither is restricted by the action of the other. The tax is computed in whatever way each jurisdiction may determine without regard to what the other may .do. We believe that this conclusion is sustained by the decision of the Supreme Court in United States vs. Perkins, 163 U. S. 625. In this case a testator domiciled in New York gave a legacy to the United States. New York sought to impose an inheritance tax on the legacy, which was resisted as a tax on the federal government. The Supreme Court denied the contention of the government on the ground that the tax was not imposed on the United States but on the New York testator's right to to dispose of his estate. The Court declared that "the legacy becomes the property of the United States only after it has suffered a diminution to the amount of the tax." It seems therefore clear that the state in assessing and computing an inheritance tax is in no way concerned with the fact that the federal government also exacts a similar tax upon the same rights and privileges. There is no rule of priority to be observed but each jurisdiction proceeds independent of the other. The fact that this results in double taxation is no objection to the legality of the tax, although it might be a proper basis for an appeal to the legislature or to Congress. It is desirable, however, that in the matter of assessing inheritance taxes the states should adopt a uniform practice on the question of deducting the federal tax before assessing the state tax. The Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws might very properly be asked to recommend a uniform law establishing the practice in this regard to be observed by all the states. NOTES OF IMPORTANT DECISIONS. IS AN ORDER OF A COURT OF BANKRUPTCY, DENYING A MOTION TO DISMISS A PETITION, REVIEWABLE BY AN APPEAL OR A PETITION TO REVISE?-Whether one who is aggrieved by the action of the District Court in a bankruptcy proceeding has a right of appeal to the Circuit Court of Appeals (Sec. 24a) or is limited to a petition to revise (Sec. 24b) is not infrequently a difficult question to decide. The right of appeal is given in respect to any decision of a controversy arising in bankruptcy proceedings of which the Court of Appeals would have had appellate jurisdiction if it had arisen in any other case in a federal Court. The right to revise is a summary jurisdiction given to the Court of Appeals to correct the errors of law of the District Court in bankruptcy proceedings, that is, the ordinary steps taken in such a proceeding to determine the fact of bankruptcy and administer the estate of the bankrupt. The difficulty in determining the proper remedy in such cases is illustrated by the recent decision of the U. S. Court of Appeals (2nd Cir.) in the case of In re Dressler Producing Corporation, 262 Fed. Rep. 257. In this case appellant, Marie Dressler, owning one half of the stock of the alleged bankrupt corporation, instituted a proceeding in the New York Supreme Court to dissolve the corporation and to appoint a receiver. The directors subsequently filed in the federal Court an admission of bankruptcy, and asked to be declared a bankrupt. They further prayed that the proceedings in the state Court be stayed. The District Court, against the prayer in the intervening petition of appellant, assumed jurisdiction and stayed the proceedings in the state Court. The ground of appellant's intervening petition was that the corporation was not insolvent and that the admission of bankruptcy was made for the fraudulent purpose of defeating the state Court's jurisdiction. The appellant sought a review of the trial Court's action and filed both an appeal and a petition to revise. On the question of the proper appellate procedure the Court of Appeals held that a defeated party in a bankruptcy proceeding could not take advantage of both remedies for review but must choose the proper one. In this case the Court held that the proper method of review was by petition to revise, which brought up only questions of law. On this interesting point, the Court said: "We have considered the cause as coming to us pursuant to a petition to revise, rather than an appeal. Summary proceedings are reviewable only by a petition to revise. In re Goldstein, 216 Fed. 887, 133 C. C. A. 91; Gibbons v. Goldsmith, 222 Fed. 826, 138 C. C. A. 252. Where the Court of bankruptcy has erroneously retained jurisdiction to adjudicate the rights of an adverse claimant itself, the action may be reviewed by a petition to revise. Mueller v. Nugent, 184 U. S. 1, 22 Sup. Ct. 269, 46 L. Ed. 405; Shea v. Lewis, 206 Fed. 877, 124 C. C. A. 537; In re Gill, 190 Fed. 726, 111 C. C. A. 454; In re Vanoscope Co., 233 Fed. 54, 147 C. C. A. 123. There is a clear distinction between 'controversies arising in bankruptcy proceedings' and 'bankruptcy proceedings.' Bankruptcy proceedings, broadly speaking, cover questions between the alleged bankrupt and include the matters of administration generally, such as appointments of receivers and trustees, allowance of claims, and matters to be disposed of summarily. All of these matters occur in the settlement of the estate. In re Friend, 134 Fed. 778, 67 C. C. A. 500. The determining factor or the important considerations for ascertaining to which class the particular application belongs is to determine the object and character of the proceedings sought to be reviewed. If it is a controversy arising in bankruptcy proceedings, the Circuit Courts of Appeals exercise their jurisdiction as in other cases, under section 24a (Comp. St. § 9608). If the controversy pertains to proceedings in bankruptcy relative to the adjudication and the subsequent steps in bankruptcy, it is one which may be reviewed in matters of law upon notice and a petition by the aggrieved party." In the earlier cases these two remedies for review of bankruptcy proceedings were regarded as cumulative and not exclusive. In re Lee, 182 Fed. 579; In re Flatland, 196 Fed. 310; In re Holmes, 142 Fed. 391. In the Lee case it was said that "an aggrieved party often has a choice of these methods." But the later authorities hold that the remedies are exclusive. Salsburg v. Blackford, 204 Fed. 438; Barnes v. Pampel, 192 Fed. 525; Bothwell v. Fitzgerald, 219 Fed. 408. In Moody v. Century Savings Bank, 239 U. S. 374, 36 Sup. Ct. 111, the distinction between the two remedies is carefully set forth. The Court said: "Whether the Circuit Court of Appeals rightly sustained its jurisdiction turns upon whether this is one of those 'controversies arising in bankruptcy proceedings' over which the Circuit Courts of Appeals are invested, by section 24a of the Bankruptcy Act, with the same appellate jurisdiction that they possess in other cases under Judicial Code, § 128 (Comp. St. § 1120), or is a mere step in bankruptcy proceedings the appellate review of which is regulated by other provisions of the Bankruptcy Act? If it is a controversy arising in bankruptcy proceedings, the jurisdiction of that Court was properly invoked, as is also that of this Court. We entertain no doubt that it is such a controversy. It has every attribute of a suit in equity for the marshaling of assets, the sale of the incumbered property, and the application of the proceeds to the liens in the order and mode ultimatey fixed by the decree. True, it was begun by the trustees and not by an adverse claimant; but this is immaterial, for the mortgagees, who claimed adversely to the trustees, not only appeared in response to notice 'of the trustees' petition, but asserted their mortgage liens and sought to have them enforced against the proceeds of the property conformably to the contentions before stated. This was the equivalent of an affirmative intervention, and, when taken in connection with the trustees' petition, brought into the bankruptcy proceedings a controversy which was quite apart from the ordinary steps in such proceedings and well within the letter and spirit of section 24a." A WIFE RECEIVING SEPARATE MAINTENANCE CAN RECOVER UNDER WORKMEN'S COMPENSATION ACT.-The Workmen's Compensation Acts usually provide that compensation in the event of workman's death, shall be paid to his dependents; and among those usually listed in the catagory of dependents is a wife "living with her husband or for whose support such husband was legally liable at the time of his death." It was recently contended that this language did not include a wife living apart from her husband with a decree for separate maintenance but the Supreme Court of California held that since the husband, by virtue of the decree of maintenance, is "legally liable" for his wife's support, the wife in such a case is entitled to the benefits of the Workmen's Compensation Act as a dependent. The Court said: "There are cited in petitioner's behalf authorities to the effect that, when there has been a divorce a mensa et thoro with a decree of maintenance to the wife, the common-law obligation of the husband is supplanted by the obligation of the decree and the husband's respon sibility is measured by the decree. This is true in the sense that the husband's obligation, previously indefinite as to the amount of sup port or the manner in which it should be provided, is by such a decree made certain by requiring that the obligation be met by paying a certain amount of money, and paying it to the wife. Thereafter the husband's obligation is measured by the decree, but the fundamental obligation continues. The decree is, in fact, a judicial determination of the fact that the obligation exists, although the parties are sepa rated." IS ONE WHO DREW UP A WILL ESTOPPED TO RECEIVE THE BENEFITS OF HIS OWN MISTAKE?-The question whether one can take advantage of his own mistake is discussed in the recent case of Reed v. Hollister, 186 Pac. Rep. 819. In this case it appeared that defendant, an attorney, drew up a will for his mother, by which she attempted to exercise a power of appointment with respect to a fund of $40,000 created by the will of her deceased husband. The trustee of the fund refused to recognize the bequests in the will as a proper exercise of the power and turned the entire fund over to the defendant, to whom it would have descended, under his father's will, in default of the exercise of the power of appointment by the widow. Under the will, which was an attempt to exercise the power of appointment, defendant would have received $8,000. The Supreme Court of California held that defendant was estopped to claim such fund and having received it from the trustee under his father's will he was to be regarded as a constructive trustee and required to pay the bequests made in the will which he himself drew up. On this point the Court said. "The circumstances attending the execution of the wiil of Philoclea A. Hollister, and the fact that both she and the defendant, who prepared the will, understood that the third clause was an execution of the power of appointment, would be sufficient of itself to raise an implied or constructive trust against the defendant. Whether the defendant, as legal adviser of his mother, was mistaken in his understanding as to whether said third clause was an exercise of the power of appointment, is unimportant, for it would be in the highest degree inequitable, and not to be countenanced by a Court of equity, to permit an attorney at law, under whose direction and suggestion a will has been prepared, to himself seize and appropriate a part of the estate, which the testator intended, and which the attorney himself intended at the time the will was drawn, to go to another legatee or devisee. It seems that under such circumstances the attorney might well be held to be estopped to claim such bequest." It seems to us that the Court's decision proceeds on the wrong theory. There is no estoppel in this case, because there was no misrepresentation of a fact by the defendant. Moreover, the defendant is not asserting a right from which assertion he can be estopped by reason of some former misrepresentation of a fact. If defendant, on the other hand, is to be held liable as a constructive trustee, he must be found to have intentionally misled the testatrix in executing the power of her will, and such action would then constitute such fraud in the acquisition of the fund as to create a constructive trust in favor of those defrauded of their interest under the will of the testatrix. A mere mistake in the matter of advising the testator in making her will cannot make the defendant responsible as a constructive trustee. Moreover, in this case the trust fund belonged to an entirely different estate and was under the control of the Courts of another state. Defendant was awarded the fund by those properly in control of the fund, and, it seems to us, that the proceedings in this case should have been brought against the trustee of the fund who had the right to deter mine, in accordance with the law of the state, where the power was created, whether the power had been properly exercised and who was entitled to the fund in default of the proper execution of the power. THE RECORD OF THE "RAINBOW DIVISION" IN THE WAR AS TOLD BY A LAWYER. It is very easy to start talking about the war, but it is much harder to stop talking about it. The fact is that anyone who saw our men fight over there is so filled with admiration for what the American soldier did that he seizes with eagerness on every chance to tell the people at home about their acts. As Congressman McKinley said, it American organization, American brains, that let the men fight at the front. You can go farther than that and say it was America's immense resources in material and men and money that won the war. We did win the war. What fighting we did, compared to the three and a half years of the Allies' fighting was very small, but it was *[This interesting address by Col. Noble B. Judah of the Chicago bar before the Illinois Bar Association is really classic in its descriptions, and we find it a pleasure to comply with the suggestion that we give our readers the opportunity to enjoy it.-Editor.] was the final punch. And without any bragging, it is fair for the Americans to say that the American armies did finally win the war. I do not know any better way to tell you about what those men did than to tell you the story of one division, the 42nd, the Rainbow Division, not because it was typical of all American divisions-we thought it was the best one there-but because it was one of the divisions that entered the war early and saw all its phases. The great number of American divisions that got in in the summer and fall of 1918 saw only the one phase of the war when it had developed into open warfare, whereas the First, Second and Twenty-sixth and Forty-second, the early divisions, saw old-fashioned trench warfare. They then helped to break the Germans in semi-open warfare and then fought them to a finish in open warfare, and the Rainbow Division was one of those divisions. We speak of a division because it is the smallest self-supporting unit of the army. Roughly, it numbers 25,000 men, four infantry regiments, three artillery regiments, one engineer regiment, three machine-gun battalions, ambulance companies, field hospitals, supply trains, and so on, a unit that can fight, has all the auxiliary weapons, can feed its own men, supply food and ammunition and take care of its wounded and sick. It moves and acts by itself. The Rainbow Division was made up of old National Guard units, the much despised militia. It was organized on paper in Washington in August and was gathered together on Long Island ready to sail for France in September, 1917. I do not know why they called it the Rainbow, except that we had units from so many states. We had organizations from twenty-six different states. Our infantry was the old 69th New York, an Irish regiment, from the days of the Civil War, the 4th Ohio, 3rd Iowa and the 1st Alabama; the artillery was the 1st Minnesota, 1st Indiana and 1st Illinois, later the 149th Field Artillery. In that regiment we had four batteries from Chicago, one from Champaign, the University of Illinois, and one from Danville. The machine-gun battalions were from Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Wisconsin; Engineers from South Carolina and California; ammunition train from Kansas; supply train from Texas; field signal battalion from Missouri; trench mortar battery from Delaware, and so on, from twenty-six different states. We were gathered at Camp Mills, and on the 18th of October sailed for France and landed there on the first of November, 1917. At that date there were less than 50,000 American fighting men in France, the whole of the 1st Division, a regular army division, part of the 2nd regulars and part of the 26th Division, National Guard from New England-less than 50,000 fighting men on November 1, 1917. A year later, at the date of the armistice, there were more than two million fighting men there and over 750,000 fighting in one battle. You can look at all the failures of our government, the ordnance, the aviation, the extravagances, but look at the other side of it and the mistakes look small. If we had done no more than transport those two million men, it would have been an achievement. But we drafted them, trained them, transported them, and when they reached France they were fighting men. When Gen. Joffre was here in the spring of 1917 he asked the United States to send men. They knew we had no trained soldiers in the European sense, but they wanted to show that American soldiers could be transported to France; they wanted to boost the allies' morale. They said the training could be continued over there. And so, when we landed in France they first sent us to training camps. The artillery went to an old Napoleonic camp in Britanny, and the infantry went up closer to the lines near Toul. For three months we were trained for trench warfare under French officers, and finally, in February, we were ordered into a sector of our own. We were sent into the trenches at the edge of the Vosges Mountains, in Lorraine, a quiet sector as it was called. There were a great many places on the Western front where no big offensive was to be feared, but where constant fighting was going on and where new troops could be trained. And we went into a sector of that kind. York wanted prisoners. So they got permission to send a patrol over into the German trenches. Right opposite the New York regiment's sector was a little old destroyed village of perhaps two dozen houses. We knew there was a small German outpost there; the village was right in the wire, and the plan of our patrol was to go in through the wire, get back of the town and come out through it. We could not send a big patrol across No Man's Land. There would be too much noise, but we could send a small patrol out. We sent out a lieutenant and seven men of this 69th Irish regiment. Lieut. Cassidy was in command, O'Leary was his sergeant and Kerrigan was his corporal. They went out with their hands and faces blacked so they could not be seen in the dark, and armed only with hand grenades and trench knives. The American trench knife was a handy weapon for close fighting with a three-cornered blade and on the hilt indentations like brass Now the trenches were just what the word means, ditches in most places full of water; when we went in they were very full; it was winter and snow was still on the ground. The trenches are six, seven or eight feet deep; in front of them a strip of wire, perhaps two or three beds of wire twenty or thirty feet wide, then No Man's Land, then on the other side the German wire and German trenches. We had a front of about eight miles. At some places we were fifty feet from the German trenches, at other places six or seven hundred yards; part of the land was open, part of it was woods; and we proceeded to have some fine experience. We were in for four months. The fighting was guerilla and patrol fight-knuckles. They got across No Man's ing, but it let our men get their hands in; they found the Germans weren't any better than they were. They met them hand to hand in the trenches and No Man's Land and they gained confidence in themselves. When we went in the French had used the sector as a rest sector. Every night they pulled back their outposts. There were many French villages right in the trench systems, of course shot to pieces, destroyed. But every village in France has houses made of stone and is a natural fort and at night the French in this sector withdrew into the villages and stood on the defensive. The Americans didn't understand that. We wanted to fight, and the first week we were in the trenches our Alabama regiment ran into a German patrol in our own trenches. The Germans had come in expecting the French were still there and they struck the Alabama men. Ten Germans came into the trenches; we killed two and took two unwounded prisoners. That was first blood for us. Right next was our New York regiment, and there was rivalry all the time between New York and Alabama and New Land, which was there about four hundred yards wide; they went in, four on each side of the town, and they came down through it and then ran into the German outpost of about ten men, a sergeant in command; he was on watch and saw our men come in. Just as he saw them, Kerrigan and O'Leary jumped him. Kerrigan was an ex-New York policeman and O'Leary had been an insane asylum keeper. All they had was their trench knives but there wasn't much left of the German sergeant and they brought the rest of his outfit back across No Man's Land. The Germans were strong and of course they came back at us. And we had, in four months in that sector more than two thousand casualties, but we never lost an unwounded prisoner and no German ever got inside our lines. The thing that astonished the French was the fact that these new, green men and officers could fight, and fight well and coolly. The first small raid made by the Germans on our Iowa regiment was a very severe one at one point in the line. They isolated one of our strong points with |