defendant is ignorant of one of the facts making up the total environment, and which must be present to make his action wrong.  He is ignorant, that is to say, that the true owner either has or claims any interest in the property in question, and therefore he does not intend a wrongful act, because he does not mean to deal with his neighbor’s property.  But the answer to this is, that he does intend to do the damage complained of.  One who diminishes the value of property by intentional damage knows it belongs to somebody.  If he thinks it belongs to himself, he expects whatever harm he may do to come out of his own pocket.  It would be odd if he were to get rid of the burden by discovering that it belonged to his neighbor.  It is a very different thing to say that he who intentionally does harm must bear the loss, from saying that one from whose acts harm follows accidentally, as [98] a consequence which could not have been foreseen, must bear it.

Next, suppose the act complained of is an exercise of dominion over the plaintiff’s property, such as a merely technical trespass or a conversion.  If the defendant thought that the property belonged to himself, there seems to be no abstract injustice in requiring him to know the limits of his own titles, or, if he thought that it belonged to another, in holding him bound to get proof of title before acting.  Consider, too, what the defendant’s liability amounts to, if the act, whether an entry upon land or a conversion of chattels, has been unattended by damage to the property, and the thing has come back to the hands of the true owner.  The sum recovered is merely nominal, and the payment is nothing more than a formal acknowledgment of the owner’s title; which, considering the effect of prescription and statutes of limitation upon repeated acts of dominion, is no more than right. 1 All semblance of injustice disappears when the defendant is allowed to avoid the costs of an action by tender or otherwise.

But suppose the property has not come back to the hands of the true owner.  If the thing remains in the hands of the defendant, it is clearly right that he should surrender it.  And if instead of the thing itself he holds the proceeds of a sale, it is as reasonable to make him pay over its value in trover or assumpsit as it would have been to compel a surrender of the thing.  But the question whether the defendant has subsequently paid over the proceeds of the sale of a chattel to a third person, cannot affect the rights of the true owner of the [99] chattel.  In the supposed case of an auctioneer, for instance, if he had paid the true owner, it would have been an answer to his bailor’s claim.  If he has paid his bailor instead, he has paid one whom he was not bound to pay, and no general principle requires that this should be held to divest the plaintiff’s right.