was held that the lien of the attachment was valid against the claim of the trustee in the assignment in Pennsylvania. The court proceeded upon the view that the laws of Pennsylvania, under which the assignment was made, had no operation in Connecticut except so far as they might be allowed to operate on principles of comity, and that there was no rule of comity which required the court to give effect to them in this instance.1 § 8073. Situs of a Debt Due by a Foreign Corporation for the Purpose of Garnishment. There is a conflict of judicial opinion upon this question,- some of the courts holding that it is the residence of the creditor which determines the location of the debt, and others that it is the residence of the debtor. Still others have held that it is the residence of the debtor, unless, by the terms of the contract creating the debt, it is payable elsewhere, in which event the place where it is payable determines its situs. It is believed that all the foregoing decisions can be harmonized on the theory that the situs of a debt, for the purpose of jurisdiction to seize it by attachment or garnishment, is the place where it is payable. The reason is very simple. The parties have made a contract that the debt shall be payable in a certain place, and the law cannot make a different contract for them by compelling the payment of the debt in a different place. It is therefore said to be well settled "that a person domiciled in a foreign jurisdiction cannot be holden here as trustee, unless he has property of the principal defendant in his possession in this State, or owes a debt or duty to such defendant, payable here, Paine v. Lester, 44 Conn. 196; 8. c. 26 Am. Rep. 442. Compare Fuller v. Steiglitz, 27 Ohio St. 355; s. c. 22 Am. Rep. 312. Williams v. Ingersoll, 89 N. Y. 508, 523; Smith v. Boston &c. R. Co., 33 N. H. 337, 342 3 Tingley v. Bateman, 10 Mass. 343; Lovejoy v. Albee, 33 Me. 414; 8. c. 54 Am. Dec. 630. And see Kneeland Attach., § 335; Drake Attach., § 474; Osgood v. Maguire, 61 N. Y. 524; Green v. Farmers' &c. Bank, 25 Conn. 452; Green's Bank v. Wickham, 23 Mo. App. 663; Jones v. Winchester, 6 N. H. 497; Sawyer v. Thompson, 24 N. H. 510. and a foreign corporation must occupy the same position."1 When the nature of the proceeding by garnishment is considered, the crucial test by which to determine this question must be whether the defendant in the attachment or execution could, at the time of the service of the notice of garnishment, have maintained an action at law against the corporation in the forum from which the garnishment issued, to recover the debt. Within the meaning of this principle, the debtor is the person owing the debt which is sought to be condemned, that is to say the garnishee,—and it is with reference to him that it has been said: "We think the better rule, and one likely to lead to the least complications, is to hold that, in all cases where the debtor resides in this State, and the debt is not by the terms of the contract payable elsewhere, he becomes chargeable as garnishee, and the court acquires jurisdiction to condemn the debt."4 Mahany v. Kephart, 15 W. Va. 609, 625. On this theory it has been held in New York that an indebtedness of one foreign corporation to another foreign corporation cannot be attached, under the New York Code of Civil Procedure, §§ 641, 644, because either the person or the thing attached must be within the State. Straus v. Chicago Glycerine Co., 46 Hun (N.Y.), 216; s. c. 11 N. Y. St. Rep. 359. But in Illinois, foreign insurance companies having agencies and doing business there, are liable as garnishees in respect of debts due to non-resident creditors, though by the terms of the contract the debt is payable elsewhere. Henderson v. Schaas, 35 Ill. App. 155. And so in Pennsylvania, it was held that where the New York & Erie Railroad Company, a corporation created under the laws of New York, which had secured permission from the State of Pennsyl vania to locate its railway line through a portion of that State, upon the condition of keeping therein a resident officer upon whom process in actions against it might be served, it was liable to garnishment in a proceeding under an "attachment execution," in respect of a judgment which had been recovered against it in another State by the principal debtor. Fithian v. New York &c. R. Co., 31 Pa. St. 114. • Green's Bank v. Wickham, 23 Mo. App. 663, 666. Where all the parties to the garnishment proceeding, the plaintiff creditor, the defendant debtor, and the corporation which had been served as garnishee, were residents of the same foreign State, it was held that the situs of the debt was in that State, and not in the State of Missouri, although the corporation had an office in Missouri, and under its laws was amenable to the process of its courts. Fielder v. Jessup, 24 Mo. App. 91. This conclusion was regarded as the more rea § 8074. Injunctions Restraining Domestic Citizens from Proceeding in a Foreign State to Subject Exempt Wages Due from Foreign Corporation.-An injunction will lie to prevent a domestic creditor from going out of the State to seize, sonable, in view of the fact that the creditor had probably resorted to the scheme of a garnishment against the corporation in another State, to avoid the effect of the statutes of the State which was the domicile of the parties, exempting the wages of the defendant from judicial process. Ibid. Opposed to this conclusion is a decision of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, in which, though Agnew, J., who wrote the opinion, proceeds with great confidence to reverse the decision of the court below, the conclusion of the court seems to be the plainest aberration. A citizen of Pennsylvania owed a debt to another citizen of Pennsylvania, payable in. Pennsylvania. While the debtor was casually in the State of Maryland, another citizen of Pennsylvania, in a proceeding in a court of that State, attached the debt by garnishment. The garnishee gave his creditor notice of the attachment. Nevertheless the Maryland court rendered judgment against him, and he paid the same. It was held that he could not thereafter be compelled to pay it over again to his own creditor. The court proceeded upon the view that the plaintiff in the attachment suit, as a citizen of Pennsylvania, had, under the Constitution of the United States, the same right of action in the State of Maryland which he would have had if he had been a citizen of the State of Maryland. Morgan v. Neville, 74 Pa. St. 52. That is all very well; but he had no greater right of action. The court overlooked the fact that a State has no jurisdiction 403 over property not within its limits; that a debt is property, and that it is property only within that jurisdiction, where, by the terms of the contract creating it, it is made payable. The Maryland Code, as recited in the opinion of the court, enacts that, if neither the defendant nor the garnishee in whose hands the property or credits may be attached, shall appear at the return day of the attachment, the court may condemn the property and credits so attached, and award execution thereof. But the court does not explain where the Maryland court acquired jurisdiction to condemn property and credits which never had any situs in Maryland, but which had their only situs in Pennsylvania. This untenable decision was followed in Bolton v. Pennsylvania Co., 88 Pa. St. 261, where the only defense was that the wages were due by the Pennsylvania Railroad Company to one of its employés for services upon its railroad in Pennsylvania, which, it must be assumed, were payable in Pennsylvania, and that such wages were attached by garnishment in Ohio, within which State the Pennsylvania Railroad Company was also a domestic corporation, and were condemned there in the attachment proceeding and paid there. Under a statute providing that suits against foreign corporations exercising franchises within the State may be brought "by a resident of this State for any cause of action; and by a plaintiff not a resident of this State, when the cause of action has arisen, or the subject of the action shall be situated 6433 by process of garnishment, a debt due by a corporation to a domestic citizen, so as to prevent his debtor from setting up his right of exemption under the statute of the domestic State, provided the corporation is amenable to the process of the domestic State. In other words, a court will restrain by injunction a domestic citizen from resorting to such a device to defraud the family of his debtor out of the exemption allowed by the domestic statute.1 § 8075. Garnishment of the Wages Due by Foreign Corporations to Non-resident Employés, Exempt in State of Residence. Nearly all the States pursue the policy of exempting, in their statute law, the wages of laborers to a certain extent, generally to the extent of the earnings for the last thirty days, from attachment or execution for their debts. It is a settled principle that statutes creating such exemptions relate to the remedy merely, and that the law which is applied is the law of the forum in which the remedy is sought, and not the law of in this State" (Laws Md. 1868, ch. 471, § 211), a garnishment proceeding cannot be maintained by citizens of the State against a foreign insurance company doing business within the State, for a debt due to a citizen of another State. Cromwell v. Royal Canadian Ins. Co., 49 Md. 366; 8. c. 33 Am. Rep. 258; Myer v. Liverpool &c. Ins. Co., 40 Md. 595. The liability in this case is not direct, as the statute contemplates. "It is well settled," said Bartol, C. J., "that the plaintiff in attachment, as against the garnishee, is subrogated to the rights of the debtor, and can recover only by the same right and to the same extent, as the debtor might recover, if he were suing the garnishee." 40 Md. 600. See also Brauser v. New England &c. Ins. Co., 21 Wis. 506. The debtor under this statute could have maintained no action against the corporation; therefore the gar nishment proceeding must fail. Thus, it has been held that, where a judgment creditor and his debtor were both residents of the State of Iowa, and the creditor sought, in the courts of another State, to subject to the payment of his judgment the exempt wages of the debtor, due him from a railroad company doing business in both States and amenable to the process of both States, that the courts of Iowa had jurisdiction to restrain, by injunction, the creditor from so proceeding. The writ in such case was operative merely against the creditor within the jurisdiction of the court, and did not impinge upon the jurisdiction of the tribunals of the other State. Teager v. Landsley, 69 Iowa, 725; Hager v. Adams, 70 Iowa, 746. the State or country within which the contract has been made.1 There is also a theory that the exemption laws of a State have no extra-territorial force, and are not applied in other States, although such other States have similar exemption laws. It is on the principle that a garnishee is not, unless required to do so by statute, bound to plead the right of exemption of his creditor, and does not make himself liable to the creditor for failing so to plead it. The obvious reason is that such an exemption is a privilege which may be waived, and that it is therefore the office of the person to whom the debt is due by the garnishee, to set up the defense that it is exempt from process if he so desires. This being so, it has been the frequent practice of the creditors of the employés of corporations to evade the exemption laws of the State of the residence of both debtor and creditor, which State is also the situs of the contract between them, by going into another State in which the corporation does business, and where it is amenable to judicial process, and there attaching, by garnishment against the corporation, the wages due by the corporation to the employé. As the corporation, when summoned as garnishee, is under no obligation, in the absence of statute, to set up the exemption rights of the employé, and as the setting up of those rights might not be available, in that they depend upon the laws of another State, a judgment rendered against the garnishee will be a bar to any action against it for his wages by the employé in the State of the residence of the former.' The hardships of this rule could be avoided in all cases by adopting the course taken by the Supreme Court of Illinois, which was that of holding that a statute exempting a limited 1 Helfenstein v. Cave, 3 Iowa, 287; Newell v. Hayden, 8 Iowa, 140; Leiber v. Union Pacific R. Co., 49 Iowa, 688; Mineral Point R. Co. v. Barron, 83 Ill. 365; Morgan v. Neville, 74 Pa. St. 52; Bolton v. Pennsylvania Co., 88 Pa. St. 261. : Jones v. Tracy, 75 Pa. St. 417; Baltimore &c. R. Co. v. May, 25 Ohio St. 347; Moore v. Chicago &c. R. Co., 43 Iowa, 385. 8 Thomp. Homest., § 862; Blair v. Steinman, 52 Pa. St. 423; Strouse v. Becker, 44 Pa. St. 206; s. c. 38 Pa. St. 190; 80 Am. Dec. 474; Jones v. Tracy, 75 Pa. St. 417. Moore v. Chicago &c. R. Co., 43 Iowa, 385. |