second, to the third, and so on. Sometimes a distance of one hundred and twenty miles was thus covered in twenty-four hours. The bantaro themselves were never known to commit a theft or other crime of any kind, and, remarkably enough, they did not even "squeeze " or levy blackmail. They went about every morning with a small covered pail, and received from each house the cold victuals left over; this they often sold to beggars. Instead of food, they were some times given a small coin or two. As to the content of the legislation and the jurisprudence of the Tokugawa Shogunate, it would be useless to enter into de tails. In the rural districts the subject-matter of ordinary legal relations hardly extended be yond land-holding, with the various methods of tenancy, land sales, marriage, inheritance, adoption, mortgages, and a few easements. The development of definite customs was limited to these general subjects. In the commercial communities legal relations were naturally more varied and more complicated. The loaning of money gave rise to a variety of distinctions and refinements, and fur nished a great portion of the litigation. Sale, in all its forms, and with its attendant machinery of brokerage and credit, played an equally important part. Agency, Set-off, Carriers, Bills of Exchange, Auctions, Dam ages, Penalties, Pledges, — these are some of the special topics in the recorded cases. Of course analogies to our own system and to others are plentiful. The form, how ever, even where the legal result is the same, is often different, the result having been reached by a different road. Thus there existed the ordinary transaction of de posit for safe-keeping; but as money was often so deposited, and the privilege of loan ing it was frequently given at the same time, the rule grew up that the depositary was not liable for loss by act of God (their phrase, "calamity of Heaven," ran in curious corre spondence with our own), where a res was bailed merely for safe-keeping, while if it was money and was lent out by the bailee,
under the above privilege, the bailee was re sponsible for it absolutely. We should have placed this obligation in the category of debts arising from loans; but circumstances caused the Japanese to work out a similar liability through the machinery of deposit,— just as the Romans also, in the deposition irregulare, a similar transaction, worked out the absolute liability of an ordinary borrower of money. In security rights we find usu ally the two chief sorts — the pledge (where possession is given to the creditor ), and the hypothec (where it is retained by the debtor) — side by side in the same regions In the former case the earlier English rule of "dead pledge " obtained, that the creditor worked the land and took the profits by way of in terest, without accounting for them to the owner or applying them to the payment of the debt. In the rules for redemption we find special favor shown to the debtor; for in most localities redemption might take place at any time that the debtor or his successors obtained the money. The pledge (in the above sense) of land involved, as in the later form of our mortgage, the transfer of the legal ownership to the creditor; in the hypothec no title passed, but a registra tion at some local office was required, as at Rome. Just as the hypothec, or mortgage without transfer of possession, has, in its modern Anglo-American shape, grown from the mortgage with transfer of proprietorship entitling the creditor to possession, until in most States the real-estate mortgage has now become, even in theory, a mere hypo thec, with registration; so, too, we find in Japan that the registered hypothec came after the pledge, although the influences causing this are not clear; and in some districts we find the transition stage of a transaction known as a pledge, but really a hypothec. One might continue to cite a volume full of the interesting coincidences and diver gences which present themselves as one studies the Japanese civil law. The purely criminal law does not have the same attrac
