This instruction was rejected by the lower court, and on exceptions to this ruling, the upper court said: "The proposition embodied in this instruction doubtless finds support in some of the earlier decisions of this court, involving what was knowni as the doctrine of comparative negligence; but by more recent decisions that doctrine has been greatly modified, if not wholly repudiated."
This statement is unfortunately weakened, since the court rests its decision on another ground, - that the instruction asked for was quite unnecessary, as the law had already been laid down with sufficient accuracy and fulness. It is, therefore, somewhat hard to decide the exact weight of the case, or to conjecture what results will flow from it. At all events, it shows a tendency in the right direction.
Conversion By Bailee. — Doolittle v. Shaw, 60 N. W. R. 621 (Iowa), was one of the familiar cases of violation of a bailment for hire by driving the horse hired beyond the place designated. The distinction taken by the court was that, as the injury to the horse was occasioned by no gross negligence or wilful abuse, no conversion took place, and that such had been the doctrine of all the cases.
It is submitted that this rests upon a misapprehension of tlle action of conversion, the gist of which lies in the interference with the plaintiff's possession or right to it, amounting to a complete denial for an appre- ciable time. The court is right in saying that not every intermeddling is a conversion, nor indeed every intermeddling contrary to the terms of the bailment. There must be some act which can be interpreted as a total deprivation of the plaintiff's possession or right to it, not consented to by him. In a bailment for a specific purpose the bailor consents to lose possession of the clhattel under the conditions of the contract; but the general right to its possession subject to that exception clearly remains unimpaired, and any act interrupting wholly the right to possession except within those limits is as muclh a conversion as if there had been no bailment at all. Doubtless this application of conversion usu- ally comes up when there has been some abuse of the chattel, as it is not ordinarily injured without that; but the conversion rests on grounds quite other than that of negligence or abuse. Wentworth v. Mcduffie, 48 N. H. 402. It is altogether too strong, then, to say that this Iowa case follows the doctrine of "all the cases." But the action for conver- sion, being as it is a means of forcing title upon the converter against his will, it is most desirable that some way of limiting it should be worked out for use in cases where in justice the plaintiff is not entitled to elect title into the defendant. Such a case as this is a step away from a technical rule which enables a bailor to throw the peril of accident upon his bailee, and as such, a step in the right direction.
Development Of The Law Of Agency. — One or two bits of news in the law of privacy may be given. The well-known English case of Prince Albert v. Strange has been followed in W. S. Gilbert v. The Star Newspaper, II The Times Law Reports, 4, where Mr. Gilbert got an injunction against the disclosure of the "gags" and the plot of "His Excellency" before the public perfornmance of that comedy. An article, "The Right to Privacy," by Mr. Herbert Spencer Hadley, appeared in the October number
