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When A Man Becomes Of Age


The question sometimes arises whether it man is entitled to vote at an

election held on the day preceding the twenty-first anniversary of his

birth. Blackstone, in his Commentaries, book 1, page 463, says: Full

age in male or female is 21 years, which age is completed on the day

preceding the anniversary of a person's birth, who, till that time, is

an infant, and so styled in law. The late Chief Justice Sharswood, in

h
s edition of Blackstone's Commentaries, quotes Christian's note on the

above as follows: If he is born on the 16th day of February, 1608, he

is of age to do any legal act on the morning of the 15th of February,

1629, though he may not have lived twenty-one years by nearly

forty-eight hours. The reason assigned is that in law there is no

fraction of a day; and if the birth were on the last second of one day

and the act on the first second of the preceding day twenty-one years

after, then twenty-one years would be complete, and in the law it is the

same whether a thing is done upon one moment of the day or another.



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