716   INSURABLE INTEREST

session of the buildings, occupying them at the time of the fire. Judgment creditors, if any, would have had a preference in payment from the personal estate (2 B. S., 87, sec. 27, subs. 3, 4) and, of course, the lien acquired by the docketing of their judgments could not be disturbed by the application of the administrator for leave to sell the real estate, for the payment of debts, and the obtaining of permission to do so. But yet, the plaintiff had a right to compel an accounting by the administrator (2 H. S., 92, sec. 52), and a sale of the real estate (id., 108, sec. 48), for the payment of his and other debts. Thus, the real estate was to a degree subject to the payment thereof, and was in fact, from the slender amount of the personal property, substantially all that he could look to for payment. His position was not as good in some respects as that of a judgment creditor, but it was not unlike it; both had a right to have the real estate sold for the payment of their debts; for a certain space of time it could not escape the exercise of that right; and it cannot be said that the interest of a judgment creditor in the real estate, as an interest in property, was greater or nearer than that of the plaintiff. It was more manageable, but not more direct in the end.

* * * If there be a right in or against the property, which some court will enforce upon the property, a right so closely connected with it, and so much dependent for value upon the continued existence of it alone, as that a loss of the property will cause pecuniary damage to the holder of the right against it, he has an insurable interest. Thus a mortgagee of real estate, though he hold also the bond of the mortgagor, has an insurable interest in the buildings; while a judgment creditor of the same mortgagor, his judgment being a lien upon the same real estate and the same buildings, is said not to have an insurable interest in them. The interest of the first is said to be specific, the interest of the latter general. As a general rule, the distinction may be sound. But I think it would be difficult, to show an appreciable practical difference in the pecuniary result to the two. If the mortgagor and judgment debtor should die leaving no personal property, and no real estate save that mortgaged, it principally valuable for the buildings upon it, and they should be burned, each must then look to the real estate, the lands alone, for a security for his debt; and if that be insufficient, each must with equal certainty, suffer a pecuniary disaster, resulting directly from the fire. What legal reason is there, why the one may not, as well as the other, protect himself by a contract of insurance?

In Grevemeyer v. So. Milt. F. Ins. Co. (62 Penn. St. 340), it was held that a judgment creditor, whose judgment was taken for purchase-money of the property burned, had no insurable interest. (See, also, Conrad v. At. Ins. Co., 1 Pet. 386). The reason given is, that his lien was general and not specific; that he was not in-