492 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. should have what an ordinary person, standing in the same rela- tion to him as the lunatic, would give him ; and if a sane man would not treat such assistance as an advancement, it should not be made one by a court. We have, perhaps, dwelt unduly upon this topic of advancements, but thinking it, as we do, the one serious mis- take in the exercise of the jurisdiction, we could scarcely do otherwise. IV. This disposition of the lunatic's income, serving as it does to substitute a wise expenditure for senseless accumulation, and to carry out those imperfect obligations which are none the less real because their sanction rests rather in the customary ethics of the community than in any legal remedy upon them, deserves to be consistently followed out and developed in the future. What its future will be one does not venture to predict; but a few considera- tions may not come amiss. Where, for instance, in the law are we to classify the interest of the recipient? An income which one draws regularly from a fund in Chancery, and which can only be stopped by an order in court after due proceedings, is practically more than mere charity. But how much more? The recipient in England takes it free from all claim of his creditors, Re Hennessy, supra, p. 481 ; yet it can be settled to a wife's separate use. Re Drummond, supra, p. 478. Even arrears cannot be assigned, Re Weld, supra, p. 483; Robinson, supra, p. 485, or mortgaged ; and such action is perhaps a cause for the withdrawal of the allowance. These characteristics seem to show that it is about as far on one side of a discretionary trust, like that in Re Coleman, 39 Ch. D. 158 (1888), as Broadway Bank v. Adams, 133 Mass. 170 (1882) is on the other. Yet in the fact that it puts money, sometimes large sums in regular instalments, into the absolute control of a man whose creditors may, for all the difference it would make, be starv- ing, it more closely approaches Bank v. Adams. How far, one may ask, would the theory of Bank v. Adams be carried out? For instance, might not some American court which acted in its other decisions upon the principle that an estate to live on is an estate to pay one's debts with, make the aid conditional upon the annual payment by the recipient of some part of his honest debts? — saying, " The normal man might do this; assuming that he would, we refuse to lend our aid to such proceedings." Just as a court cannot, in the nature of the case, be as generous as the normal
