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the brick field was open when it came to the hands of the plaintiff in error, and had been so for upwards of twenty years, and in that state no other advantage could be made of it. To confine the exemption of the land-owner to the usual mode of enjoyment, will be found equally fallacious: the application of the bankrupt laws to any particular case, does not depend upon its frequency or infrequency, usualness or unusualness: the question to be considered is. Whether the business or transaction falls within the description of those laws? Besides, in point of fact, the converting brick earth into bricks and tiles, is at least as usual a mode of making advantage of that produce, as any other manufacture of any production of the earth whatsoever.

Again it is said, that where the produce of land is merely the raw material of a manufacture, and used as such; and the manufacture is not carried on as a mode of enjoying the produce of the land: or where the produce of the land is an insignificant article compared with the expence of the whole manufacture; there such owner of land is, and ought to be considered as a trader.

To contend that the manufacturing of bricks and tiles in the present case, was not a mode of enjoying the produce of the land, is begging the question; or rather assuming against the facts found by the special verdict: and it is manifest that the produce of the earth is, and must be a raw material of every manufacture of which it is the foundation. If by raw material is meant such [549] a material as requires a long and complicated process to bring it to a state fit for use; it is a known fact, that the process of making bricks or tiles of brick earth, is as simple and as little compounded as that of any other manufacture whatsoever. The process by which milk is converted into cheese, apples into cyder, allum rock into allum, and the ores of the several metals into those respective metals, is much more complex, and the change of the sensible qualities of those substances much greater, than that which takes place in the manufacture of bricks. That the value of brick earth is insignificant, compared with the expence of the whole manufacture, appeared no where in the special verdict: and in truth it will not bear a question, but that unmanufactured brick earth bears a much greater proportion to its value in a manufactured state, than either allum rock, or the ore of any mineral does to the value of the substances respectively produced from them by manufacture.

It is further said to have been adjudged, that a brick maker may be a trader, and, as such, subject to the bankrupt laws.

A dealer in allum, in coals, a manufacturer of cyder, a person who buys any part of the produce of land, and sells it in a manufactured state, may be a trader; the whole depends upon the manner of the dealing; the distinction is, where the business is carried on as a mode of enjoying the produce of land, and when carried on independently as a trade.

But then it is said, that Beraud would have been subject to the bankrupt laws, and there was no distinguishing between the case of Beraud and that of the plaintiff in error.

Whether Beraud would or would not have been subject to the bankrupt laws, would depend upon circumstances not fully disclosed: hut supposing Beraud to have followed the business of a brick maker as a trade, and renting the brick-ground in question as a convenient place for carrying on such trade; to have paid for the brick earth dug and used by him by the acre or the load, or according to any other measure, in the usual manner in which common brick makers purchase the materials used in that manufacture, or in any other manner in the course of trade; his case and that of the plaintiff in error were essentially different; for if the comparison was attempted to be made at the period of time when the petitioning creditor's debt accrued, (the only period applicable to the present question,) no kind of parallel could be drawn between the two cases. Beraud could not be said to be manufacturing the produce of his own land, parcel of a large farm, which had been a long time in his family, of which he had a long church lease, which devolved to him in a condition in which no other use could be made of it, and of which the interest which he had in it came to him in the usual way in which such property is transmitted to men from their ancestors. If the comparison should be attempted to be carried back to the more remote period immediately subsequent to the death of