“Dear Sir,—We have carefully considered the points raised in your letter to us of the 6th inst., and have also consulted Mr. Barber upon them, and with reference thereto we advise you that the law stands shortly thus:—by the 13th Eliz., c. 5, a voluntary settlement of real or personal estate will be void and may be set aside by a creditor of the settlor, upon his showing an intent on the part of the settlor to defraud his creditors; and such an intent may be inferred from the circumstances. The Bankruptcy Act 1869 (32 and 33 Vict., c. 71) contains a still more stringent provision where the voluntary settlor is a trader. These are liabilities and risks which your association cannot avoid; but they are more imaginary than real, as the donors of land to the Company are not likely to make a voluntary gift for the purpose of defeating their creditors. By the 27th Eliz., c. 4, a voluntary gift or settlement of real estate, unless it be in favour of a charity, will be avoided by a subsequent bonâ fide sale for value, even though the purchaser have notice of the voluntary settlement. This, too, is an ordinary risk from which you cannot escape, unless you are willing to submit to the jurisdiction of the Charity Commissioners. It does not often happen that a person who has made a voluntary settlement of real estate seeks to stultify his own act by a subsequent sale of the same estate, but the payment of a small consideration, or even matter ex post facto, would prevent the deed being voluntary, and the risk is not a very serious one. “We do not recollect Mr. Baker’s name, and we find no mention of it in any of your letters to us: we think you must have meant Mr. Talbot, with whose solicitors we were in communication as to some cottages and land, and it was arranged that that matter should stand over until the St. George’s Company was constituted. “As to the writing out of the memorandum and rules for signature of the Companions—the case is this: you receive donations from people who give them to you on the faith of a certain scheme of yours being duly carried out; it is therefore necessary that the leading features of that scheme should be reduced to writing, in order that there may be no misunderstanding between the givers and receivers of these donations as to the objects to which they are devoted. The signatures of the Companions are a feature of your published scheme, and in addition will be useful to show who are the acknowledged Companions having a direct interest in it—the right to elect and control the action of the Master, elect Trustees, etc., etc.; and the signatures will be the evidence of the deliberate submission of the Companions to be bound by the rules to which they subscribe their names. “But all this will not make the St. George’s Company other than a voluntary association of persons which the law will not recognize as a corporation.