Parties are usually rendered incompetent to contract either from a legal cause or from a natural cause. The legal cause may arise from some provision of the statute, or from some rule of the common law; the incompetency may however be only partial, or may not continue forever, or it may be of a continuing nature, and act as a complete bar to contracting in any form. The natural causes usually arise from some mental weakness, extending from insanity, or idiocy, to temporary mental derangement occasioned by drugs or intoxicating liquors. Infants' express contracts are now generally declared voidable, but it is still the policy of the law to protect an infant, first against himself, and an infant's appointment of an agent is generally held to be void,2 so that an infant may not therefore ratify an appointment of an agent after he reaches his majority, although some few courts permit the infant to ratify certain acts of his agent, under certain circumstances, but the great weight of authority is to the contrary. Other incompetents at common law are married women,3 but the common law disability of feme coverts has been for the most part removed,4 so that her power to appoint an agent, to act for her, is as full now, as the power of the unmarried woman, to act for herself. In Illinois a married woman cannot enter into a partnership without her husband's consent, but otherwise has full power to contract.

1 See Anson on Contracts, Part II, Chap. III.

Acts that are of a personal nature, where the work is entrusted to the individual, trusting in his special skill, or ability, for the performance of some particular work, cannot be delegated, the person first entrusted with the work must himself perform it.

A person who is of unsound mind is incapable of appointing an agent to act for him,5 the only exception to the rule being in the case where one person in good faith, as the agent of the non compos mentis, being ignorant of the lunatic's true condition, and no adjudication of insanity having been had, confers a benefit on the lunatic; in this case the contract will not be avoided unless the parties can be put in statu quo.6 A person may be temporarily deprived of his powers of reason by drunkenness, the contracts of a person so situated are therefore voidable. The intoxicated person may ratify the agent's acts when he recovers from the effects of intoxication if he elects so to do, the appointment of the agent having been made while the principal was intoxicated.

2 Trueblood vs. Trueblood, 8 Ind.,

195; Armitage vs. Widoe, 36

Mich., 124. 3 Caldwell vs. Waters, 18 Penn.

State, 79; Lewis vs. Lee, 3 B.

& C, 291. 4 Weisbod vs. Chicago, etc., Ry.

Co., 18 Wis., 35; Rowell vs.

Klein, 44 Ind., 290. 5 Menkins vs. Lightner, 18 I11., 282;

Bush vs. Breining, 57 Am.

State Rep., 469. 6 McCormick vs. Littler, 85 I11., 62;

Ruck vs. Fenton, 14 Bush.

(Ky.), 490.