The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1886-08-14 00:00:00

TEE INDIAN RAILWAY SYSTEM.

Some idea of the value and importance of the
Indian railway system, with its connected steamer
services, may be gathered from the fact that the
i
capital sunk in these undertakings s estimated at
£161,917,840. Of this large BUM the Government
have spent directly £82,255,391. The capital outlay
of guaranteed companies stands at £71,032,838, and
that of the ." assisted" companies at £3,808,232.
Native States—the principal in this respect being
Mysore and Hyderabad—are responsible for an out-
lay of £4,821,379 on lines within their territories.
When the construction of railways in India was first
mooted there were some who warned the projectors
that caste prejudices would prevent the natives from
using them; but it is an astonishing fact that last
year Indian railways carried no fewer than 80,864,779
passengers, who paid for their fares £5,538,126. In
1884 the number of passengers was 73,815,119, anti
their freight was valued at £5,070,754. The chief
income of most railways, however, is derived from its
goods traffic, and in this respect the Indian lines yield
more than double the receipts obtained from pas-
sengers. No less than 18,925,385 tons of goods were
carried, the receipts from which amounted to
£11,915,375. Both the tonnage transported and the
return show an increase over the figures of the pre-
vious year, which was credited with a goods traffic of
16,663,007 tons, and receipts therefrom amounting to
£10,565,941.

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THE CLAIM TO BUCKINGHAMSHIRE
•
ESTATES;
In the Chancery Division on Tuesday, Mr. Justice
Chitty delivered judgment in the extraordinary eject-
ment action of Andrewes v. Uthwatt. The plaintiff,
Henry Andrewes, who had assumed the name of
lithwatt, claimed Mates in Buckinghamshire of the
estimated value of £BO,OOO, situate at Great Linford,
and belonging to the Andrewes-Uthwatt family. It
appeared that the plaintiff claimed to be the heir of
these estates under the family settlements, on the
ground that he was the eldest son of Augustus
Andrewes Uthwatt, who by the death of elder brothers
without male issue, succeeded in 1877, when an old
man of 80 years of age, as tenant for life to the
family property. The plaintiff's father died in
1885. During the period of his enjoyment
of the property he had treated :his next brothel
Edolph and his two sons as heirs to the property, per-
mitting Edolph's widow, on Edolph's death in 1882,
to reside rent free on the property, and even during
Edolph's lifetime inciting Edolph to write to the
widow of the brother whom he (Augustus) had suc-
ceeded, claiming sums for timber which had been cut
down, and repudiating jointure charges on the estate.
There was nothing to show that Augustus, the plain-
tiff's father, had ever mentioned to any member of
the Great Linford family the existence of the plain-
tiff, or indeed of any union with himself and plain-
tiff's mother; but, on the contrary, it appeared that
he went amongst the members of that family by the
sobriquet of the old bachelor. The plaintiff's case
was that his father, Augustus, who had been brought
up as a solicitor, about 1835 left Barnet, where he
was practising, and gave up business, and lived
about in great poverty at a variety of places at a
distance from Great Linford. About the same
time he was married to one Hannah Charlotte
Manning, the orphan daughter of a Captain Manning,
by whom he had issue, the plaintiff, another son now
a clergyman in London, and three daughters. The
plaintiff's mother died in 1871. The plaintiff's father
(Augustus) left by his will his personal estate
amongst the plaintiff's sisters. The plaintiff was un-
able to produce the marriage certificate of his
parents,.but produced certificates of the baptism of
himsetr, his brother, and his sisters, and other docu-
ments; and also evidence of persons showing that
his father and mother were in the places where
they lived, and amongst the persons whom they
moved always regarded as husband and wife, and that
Plaintiff's father behaved to his mother as if she were
his wife. The plaintiff accounted for his father's
behaviour in suppressing the knowledge of the exist-
ence of himself as heir to the property on the ground
that he had displeased his father, and that his father
had against him the intensest and most implacable
hatred, and the plaintiff's brother, the clergyman,
when examined in the witness-box, supported the
plaintiff's statement in this respect, going so far as to
say that. a letter which was produced containing some-
what kind expressions by the plaintiff's father in refer-
ence to the plaintiff, was nevetheless written in a
spirit of the most consummate sarcasm. The sisters
also supported their brother's statement. The plain-
tiff said he had offended his father in various ways.
It appeared that the plaintiff's father, in 1862. articled
his son to a chemist, with a view of his ultimately,
becoming a medical man, but the indentures were can-
celled for some misconduct. In 1870 the plaintiff again
offended his father by marrying a master mariner's
daughter, and by proposing to insert an advertisement
of his marriage in the papers. At this proposal his
father was very angry, indeed, and forbade him
to proclaim his marriage. In 1883 the plaintiff
again offended his father by defending himself in
person for three days in a. petition his wife had
brought against him in the Divorce Court, and upon
which his wife obtained a decree. The plaintiff's
father had wished him to avoid so far as possible the
publicity attending such proceedings. and was much
incensed with his disobedience in this respect. The
plaintiff relied on the maxim of law omnia rite acta
esse peasumuntur, or that the law presumes that
what ought to be the case is the case, and places the
weight of proof of the contrary on the party who
alleges the contrary, and produced decided cases in
which the maxim had been applied to cases of disputed
marriages, with the result that it had been held that
after a long cohabitation with common reputation of
marriage the presumption was that the relation
between the reputably married persons was that of
marriage and not that of concubinage. The trial
lasted eight days, and the witnesses were examined in
Court. Mr. Macnaghten, Q.C., M.P., Mr. Romer,
Q.C., Mr. Swinfen Eady, and Mr. Eve appeared for
the plaintiff; and Mr. Rigby, Q.C., Mr. Finlay, Q.C.,
M.P.. and Mr. Vaughan Hawkins for the defendant.
Mr. Justice Chitty said that the English law re-
quired a valid ceremony of marriage to be performed
between parties gontracting marriage, bat it was un-
doubtedly the case that a marriage could be proved
by reputation. The reputation might be strong or
weak, according to the evidence upon which it was
sought to establish it. Where the evidence was
strong, the law was that to break down the reputation
of marriage evidence should be produced on the
other side sufficiently strong to negative every pos-
sibility of a marriage having taken place. In a
weak case, however, the presumption of law need
not be rebutted by &itch strong evidence. In the
present case, he doubted the documentary evidence,
and the treatment of the plaintiff's mother
by his father was favourable to the plaintiff's
case, that his mother was legally married and the
wife of his father; but on the other hand there
was strcna evidence supporting a contrary supposi-
tion. The only way to form a judgment of the case
was to look at the evidence as a whole, and form a
view therecn. It was a singular thing that the
plaintiff's evidence went to show that when his
mother was in her last illness, and almost in expecta-
tion of death, when anxiously solicited by her son the
clergyman to disclose the circumstances of her mar-
riage that she declined to answer questions about it.
It was also noticeable that the evidence of refutation
of marriage did not begin until after the death of all
the five children. Again, it was a singular thing that
the plaintiff's father thought fit to bring up his soes. in
an humble way, although at the very time that he
was apprenticed to a chemist such son, according
to the case put forward by the plaintiff, had every
reasonable expectation of succeeding to a large family
estate. Again, it did not appear from the correspon-
dence produced that the plaintiff's father objected to
the announcement of the plaintiff's marriage in the
papers; all that he appeared to have objected to was
that he should appear as the son of Augustus An-
drews Uthwatt. 'Moreover, the conduct of the father
in treating his nephew as the heir was not in har-
mony with tlae theory of a marriage between the
plaintiff's parents having ever occurred, and even more
than that, if a marriage had actually taken place,
then the plaintiff's father was actually committing a
fraud by making the widow of the tenant for life,
whom he succeeded responsible for her husband's
damage to the estate, to his nephew and not to the
legitimate heir. Nor did he consider that the
theory that the plaintiff's father had bastardised
his own son by destroying tha marriage certi-
ficate was a tenable one. The correspondence
showed that the theory of implacable hatred of the
father towards the son was without support, and
on the contrary, that at least until the period
of the divorce proceedings he used expressions
of affection in reference to him that must
be treated as genuine. Moreover, why should a
father out of hatred to one of his children, bastardise
all the rest of his children? It was, undoubtedly.
the fact that the father had lived a double life, and
the key to the whole story was that he had not the
courage to tell his children that they were illegiti-
mate, while he was too honest, when he came into the
family estate, to do anything which would throw a
doubt on its devolution after death. His mode of
treating his nephew as the heir must be deemed as a
solemn and decisive answer to his childreri's questions
as to the secret of their birth. It was to be remem-
bered that if the plaintiff was, in fact, the eldest son,
his father's conduct to him was no doubt inhuman,
but on the other hand his behaviour in recognising
his nephew as the heir would also be an instance of
refined cruelty. His judgment was that the plaintiff
was illegitimate, and his action must be dismissed,
with costs.