HAY 11.. ALEXANDRIA ar W. B. 00. 27
As to the objection that these four judgments, and the three others
that were sued over in this court by Hay, and judgment anew ob-
tained upon them in 1881, were merged in the new decree and judg-
ment, it is to be remarked that one of the objects of section 12 of the
182d chapter of the Code of Virginia, in requiring judgments to be
kept alive by scire facias, or new action, within 10 or 20 years, ac-
cording as the issuing and return of executions on them might de- `
termine, was to provide a means of keeping alive judgments and
their liens; and of quieting titles where judgment creditors slept too
long on their rights. It is therefore a very strange pretension that
the pursuit of the very remedies given by the state to keep alive
judgments, and their liens, merges and extinguishes them. Although
executions had been taken out on the original judgments owned by
Hay, much time had elapsed when his suits were brought upon them
in this court in 1875. Doubtless the provisions of section 12 of the
182d chapter of the Code suggested and induced those actions; and
this court is unwilling to hold, inview of these statutory require-
ments, that the plaintiff in those suits, by complying with those re-
quirements, lost the very rights wl1ich he was seeking to perpetuate.
Whatever may be the general doctrine in other jurisdictions, as to
the merger of one judgment into another, it cannot be so applied in
Virginia as to convert the statutory provisions that have been alluded
to into a delusion and a snare. Besides, it is to be observed, as to
the four judgments which were the subject of the equity suit, that
suit wasbrought, not to obtain a new judgment upon the old ones,
but to strike from the old ones an inscription which rendered them
practically valueless, and to restore to them their original force and
attributes. The object was the opposite of merging them, if that
were the necessary effect of obtaining a new judgment on an old one.
It was to place them in stem quo as of the dates on which they were
originally recovered, divested of the satisfactions which had been im-
providently put upon them. The doctrine of merger, therefore, what-
ever it may be in ordinary cases, does not apply to these four judg-
ments.
Summing up what has been said, the several debts stand as to
each other in the following order: (1) the debt due the cityof Wash-
ington; (2) the bonds held under the Lennox deed; (3) the Hay
judgments, seven in number; and (4) the unsecured claim of Fowle,
Snowden & Co.
It remains to be considered how these several claims stand in re-
spect to the claim for betterments put upon the western 18;- feet of
the roadway of the Alexandria & Washington Company while in pos-
session of the Alexandria & Fredricksburg Railway Company under
the proceedings taken in the county court of Alexandria county. It
is clear that this claim can only affect the western strip of roadway
that has been mentioned; and the conditions prescribed by statute
entitling the Alexandria & Fredricksburg Company to compensa-