framed by a convention that sat at Denver from December 1875 to March 1876; various territorial conventions met here; and here W. J. Bryan was nominated in 1908 for the presidency.
DEODAND (Lat. Deo dandum, that which is to be given to God), in English law, was a personal chattel (any animal or thing) which, on account of its having caused the death of a human being, was forfeited to the king for pious uses. Blackstone, while tracing in the custom an expiatory design, alludes to analogous Jewish and Greek laws,[1] which required that what occasions a man’s death should be destroyed. In such usages the notion of the punishment of an animal or thing, or of its being morally affected from having caused the death of a man, seems to be implied. The forfeiture of the offending instrument in no way depends on the guilt of the owner. This imputation of guilt to inanimate objects or to the lower animals is not inconsistent with what we know of the ideas of uncivilized races. In English law, deodands came to be regarded as mere forfeitures to the king, and the rules on which they depended were not easily explained by any key in the possession of the old commentators. The law distinguished, for instance, between a thing in motion and a thing standing still. If a horse or other animal in motion killed a person, whether infant or adult, or if a cart ran over him, it was forfeited as a deodand. On the other hand, if death were caused by falling from a cart or a horse at rest, the law made the chattel a deodand if the person killed were an adult, but not if he were below the years of discretion. Blackstone accounts for the greater severity against things in motion by saying that in such cases the owner is more usually at fault, an explanation which is doubtful in point of fact, and would certainly not account for other instances of the same tendency. Thus, where a man’s death is caused by a thing not in motion, that part only which is the immediate cause is forfeited, as “if a man be climbing up the wheel of a cart, and is killed by falling from it, the wheel alone is a deodand”; whereas, if the cart were in motion, not only the wheel but all that moves along with it (as the cart and the loading) are forfeited. A similar distinction is to be found in Britton. Where a man is killed by a vessel at rest the cargo is not deodand; where the vessel is under sail, hull and cargo are both deodand. For the distinction between the death of a child and the death of an adult Blackstone accounts by suggesting that the child “was presumed incapable of actual sin, and therefore needed no deodand to purchase propitiatory masses; but every adult who died in actual sin stood in need of such atonement, according to the humane superstition of the founders of the English law.” Sir Matthew Hale’s explanation was that the child could not take care of himself, whereon Blackstone asks why the owner should save his forfeiture on account of the imbecility of the child, which ought to have been an additional reason for caution. The finding of a jury was necessary to constitute a deodand, and the investigation of the value of the instrument by which death was caused occupied an important place among the provisions of early English criminal law. It became a necessary part of an indictment to state the nature and value of the weapon employed—as, that the stroke was given by a certain penknife, of the value of sixpence—so that the king might have his deodand. Accidents on the high seas did not cause forfeiture, being beyond the domain of the common law; but it would appear that in the case of ships in fresh water the law held good. The king might grant his right to deodands to another. In later times these forfeitures became extremely unpopular; and juries, with the connivance of judges, found deodands of trifling value, so as to defeat the inequitable claim. At last, by an act of 1846 they were abolished, the date noticeably coinciding with the introduction of railways and modern steam-engines.
DEOGARH, the name of several towns of British India. (1) A town in the Santal Parganas district of Bengal. Pop. (1901) 8838. It is famous for a group of twenty-two temples dedicated to Siva, the resort of numerous pilgrims. It is connected with the East Indian railway by a steam tramway, 5 m. in length. (2) The headquarters of the Bamra feudatory state in Bengal; 58 m. by road from the Bamra Road station on the Bengal-Nagpur railway. Pop. (1901) 5702. The town, which is well laid out, with parks and gardens, and pleasantly situated in a hollow among hills, rapidly increased in population under the enlightened administration of the raja, Sir Sudhal Rao, K.C.I.E. (b. 1860). It has a state-supported high school affiliated to Calcutta University, with a chemical and physical laboratory. (3) The chief town of the Deogarh estate in the state of Udaipur, Rajputana, about 68 m. N.N.E. of the city of Udaipur. It is walled, and contains a fine palace. Pop. (1901) 5384. The holder of the estate is styled rawat, and is one of the first-class nobles of Mewar. (4) Deogarh Fort, the ancient Devagiri or Deogiri (see Daulatabad).
DÉOLS, a suburb of the French town of Châteauroux, in the department of Indre. Pop. (1906) 2337. Déols lies to the north of Châteauroux, from which it is separated by the Indre. It preserves a fine Romanesque tower and other remains of the church of a famous Benedictine abbey, the most important in Berry, founded in 917 by Ebbes the Noble, lord of Déols. A gateway flanked by towers survives from the old ramparts of the town. The parish church of St Stephen (15th and 16th centuries) has a Romanesque façade and a crypt containing the ancient Christian tomb of St Ludre and his father St Leocade, who according to tradition were lords of the town in the 4th century. There are also interesting old paintings of the 10th century representing the ancient abbey. The pilgrimage to the tomb of St Ludre gave importance to Déols, which under the name of Vicus Dolensis was in existence in the Roman period. In 468 the Visigoths defeated the Gauls there, the victory carrying with it the supremacy over the district of Berry. In the middle ages the head of the family of Déols enjoyed the title of prince and held sway over nearly all Lower Berry, of which the town itself was the capital. In the 10th century Raoul of Déols gave his castle to the monks of the abbey and transferred his residence to Châteauroux. For centuries this change did not affect the prosperity of the place, which was maintained by the prestige of its abbey. But the burning of the abbey church by the Protestants during the religious wars and in 1622 the suppression of the abbey by the agency of Henry II., prince of Condé and of Déols, owing to the corruption of the monks, led to its decadence.
DEPARTMENT (Fr. département, from départir, to separate into parts), a division. The word is used of the branches of the administration in a state or municipality; in Great Britain it is applied to the subordinate divisions only of the great offices and boards of state, such as the bankruptcy department of the Board of Trade, but in the United States these subordinate divisions are known as “bureaus,” while “department” is used of the eight chief branches of the executive.
A particular use of the word is that for a territorial division of France, corresponding loosely to an English county. Previous to the French Revolution, the local unit in France was the province, but this division was too closely bound up with the administrative mismanagement of the old régime. Accordingly, at the suggestion of Mirabeau, France was redivided on entirely new lines, the thirty-four provinces being broken up into eighty-three departments (see French Revolution). The idea was to render them as nearly as possible equal to a certain average of size and population, though this was not always adhered to. They derived their names principally from rivers, mountains or other prominent geographical features. Under Napoleon the number was increased to one hundred and thirty, but in 1815 it was reduced to eighty-six. In 1860 three new departments were created out of the newly annexed territory of Savoy and Nice. In 1871 three departments (Bas-Rhin, Haut-Rhin and Moselle) were lost after the German war. Of the remains of the Haut-Rhin was formed the territory of Belfort, and the fragments of the Moselle were incorporated in the department of Meurthe, which was renamed Meurthe-et-Moselle, making the number at present eighty-seven. For a complete list of the departments see France. Each department is presided over by an officer called a prefect, appointed by the government, and assisted by a
- ↑ Compare also the rule of the Twelve Tables, by which an animal which had inflicted mischief might be surrendered in lieu of compensation.
