39 Conn. 270 | Conn. | 1872
This case was tried in the Court of Common Pleas and judgment there given for the plaintiff. The defendants seek for a new trial. In their brief the defendants’ counsel state the facts thus:
On the 23d of March, 1867, the plaintiff was indebted to the defendant Holcomb and was insolvent. He had a son Arthur, seventeen years of age, and on that day gave him a letter of emancipation, by which he agfeed that his services and future earnings, which then belonged to the plaintiff, should belong thereafter to the son. There was no consideration whatever for this gift. In September of that year Arthur negotiated for the purchase of a colt with one Hays, who completed the sale with the plaintiff’s wife, and conveyed the title to her in the same month. She paid therefor five dollars of her own, and Arthur thereafter caused $22.50 of his wages, earned after the date of the letter of emancipation, to be paid as part payment for the colt. This colt was afterwards exchanged for a horse. The defendants caused this horse to be attached in a suit against the plaintiff, and the plaintiff brings trover as trustee for his wife.
Upon these facts the defendants’ counsel make the question —Was the gift of the father to the son, of the avails of his labor thereafter, a valid one as against those who were creditors of the father at the time ? On examining the record it does not distinctly appear that the debt of the defendant Holcomb was prior in time to the letter of emancipation, but from what was said by counsel in the discussion we suppose in truth it was prior, and shall decide the case upon that as being the fact. In regard to the insolvency of Mr.' Atwood, the father, the finding is that at the time of the attachment he was, and for many years previous had been, shiftless and unable to pay his debts.
If the obligation of a minor child to labor for his father is in the nature of an ordinary debt and properly a thing in
The father by statute, with the minor’s consent, may bind his son as an apprentice to learn a useful trade, thus transferring to the master the right of service. And in such case the
If therefore by mutual consent a child is emancipated before arriving at the age of twenty-one, and is left to provide for himself under an agreement that his time shall be his own, we' think the father’s creditors have no ground to complain of the arrangement. The father relinquishes nothing which was intended as a source of profit to him, he merely remits his son to his natural rights at an earlier period than that fixed by
The father was shiftless and unable to pay his debts. Such instances are unfortunately too common, where the head of the family fails to provide comfortably for the household and is discouraged by the burden of debt from attempting much to improve his own condition or that of his family. In this state of things a son seventeen years of age proposes to start for himself and with his own earnings to provide his own food, raiment and education. The father consents, and the son by the labor of his own hands earns a few dollars, and we are called on to decide between the son’s title and that of his father’s creditors to these earnings. In a case somewhat analagous, of the wife’s earnings, which at common law belong to the husband, our statutes have carefully 'protected the proceeds of her labor from her husband’s creditors and secured them to her own use. These statutes pfpceed upon the same principle of natural law and justice which, we feel bound to apply to a child’s wages, in cases like the present. Those statutes however go much further in the protection of the wife’s earnings than we are called on to go in favor of a child’s, for as already stated the son’s wages earned before emancipation are regarded as his father’s property, and of course like other property are liable to attachment.
"We have carefully examined the authorities cited by the