the ingenious argument, the light breaks through and makes the case perfectly plain. His subtlety in legal analysis may be seen to good advantage in Le Lièvre v. Gould, Angus î'. Clifford and the Carbolic Smoke Ball case. What could be clearer, to give a single quotation, than his statement in L'.adeley v. Consolidated Bank, 38 Ch. D. 262, of the manner in which the lower court had gone wrong on an issue of partnership: "The question is whether there is a joint business or whether the parties are carrying on busi ness as principals and agents for each other. Now where has Mr. Justice Stirling gone wrong? He has gone wrong because he has not followed that test. What he has done is this. He has taken one of the circumstances which in many cases affords an ample guide to truth; he has taken that circumstance as if, taken alone, it shifted the onus of proof— as if it raised a presumption of partnership— and then he has looked about over the rest of the contract to see if he could find anything which rebutted that presumption. Now that cannot be a right way of dealing with the case. You have a group of facts—A, B, C, D, E and F—and you want to know the right conclusion to draw from them. The right way is to weigh the facts separately and together, and to draw your conclusion. It is not to take A, and say that if A stood alone it would shift the onus of proof, and then to look over B, C, D, E and F and see if the remainder of the proof is sufficient to rebut the presumption supposed to be raised." Besides the Maxim-Nordenfelt case see Finlay r. Chirney, Dashwood r. Magniac, Steinman 71. Angier Line and Brnnsden i'. Humphrey, for applications of the historical method. Allcard 71. Skinner is one of the finest specimens of his style at its best. Borthwick v. Evening Post, Hutton v. West Cork Ry. Co., and the Carbolic Smoke Ball case are characteristic specimens of his col loquial style. It is difficult to stop when one begins to quote from Lord Bowen's work. I shall conclude with an example of simple exposition. In the case of Smith v.
Land & House Property Corporation, 28 Ch. D. 14, the vendee under a contract for the sale of certain property was resisting an action for specific performance on the ground of misrepresentation, the vendor having stated that the property was let to "a most desirable tenant, when in fact the tenant had been in arrears on his last quar ter's rent, and soon afterward went into liquidation : "It is material to observe that it is often fallaciously assumed that a statement of opinion cannot involve the statement of a fact. In a case where the facts are equally well known to both parties, what one of them says to another is frequently nothing but an expression of opinion. The statement of such opinion is in a sense a statement of a fact about the condition of a man's own mind, but only of an irrelevant fact, for it is of no consequence what the opinion is. But if the facts are not equally well known to both sides, then a statement of opinion by the one who knows the facts best involves very often a statement of a material fact, for he impliedly states that he knows facts which justify his opinion. Now a landlord knows the property is let to a most desirable tenant; other persons either do not know them at all or do not know them equally well, and if the landlord says that he considers that the re lations between himself and his tenant are satisfactory, he really avers that the facts peculiarly within his knowledge are such as to render that opinion reasonable. Now are the statements here statements which involve such a representation of material facts? They are statements on a subject as to which prima facie the vendors know everything and the purchasers nothing. The vendors state that the property is let to a most desirable tenant; what does that mean? I agree that it is not a guaranty that the tenant will go on paying his rent, but it is to my mind a guaranty of a different sort, and amounts at least to an assertion that nothing has occurred in the relations between the landlord and the tenant which can be considered to make the tenant
