In re Page

131 N.W. 820, 89 Neb. 299, 1911 Neb. LEXIS 214
CourtNebraska Supreme Court
DecidedMay 23, 1911
DocketNo. 16,955
StatusPublished
Cited by2 cases

This text of 131 N.W. 820 (In re Page) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Nebraska Supreme Court primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
In re Page, 131 N.W. 820, 89 Neb. 299, 1911 Neb. LEXIS 214 (Neb. 1911).

Opinion

Reese, C. J.

This is a companion case with In re Agnew, p. 306, post, and In re King, ante, p. 298, all having been submitted upon the same “agreed stipulation of facts,” argued at the same time, and submitted on the same briefs.

Before entering upon a discussion of the case, we wish to enter our most emphatic disapproval of the manner of submission upon the so-called “agreed stipulation of facts,” and to say that, had we known before argument of what we would have to encounter in the persual of the “stipulation of facts,” we certainly should have refused to allow the cases to be submitted thereon, and have insisted that a reasonable stipulation should be filed: The agreed stipulation consists of 28 pages of printed matter of brief size, consisting of an historical sketch of the growth and development of the cracker trade, the receptacles in which the crackers were shipped, the handling of the crackers with the hands of the seller, weighing them in scales in which they were placed by the use of a scoop, then delivered or sent to the customers at their homes with other articles purchased, “such as soap, fish, cheese, kerosene, fruits, vegetables,” etc., and by which they, “from their porous and crisp nature were subject to the baleful effects of the air, moisture, and dust, find deteriorated rapidly in substance and flavor, and were liable to, and frequently did, absorb to a greater or less degree a taste or flavor of the other articles with which they were so placed or commingled,” etc. Then follows a history of the development of the package system of the National Biscuit Company, beginning with a history of the patented wrapper or paper box, made by machinery, and the placing therein of the biscuit “untouched by human hands and uncontaminated by the worst surroundings of its journey from the factory to the table of the consumer,” the wonderful sale of “ TJneeda Biscuit’ at the uniform price of 5 cents per package,” the “hundreds of millions of packages of ‘Uneeda Biscuit’ having been so manufactured and advertised and sold through[301]*301out the United States without, in a single instance, any statement being printed on the label of the net weight or measure of the contents exclusive of the container, but always, and in every instance, advertised and sold with the printed statement on the label, ‘Five Cents a Package.’ ” We are next regaled with a lucid and soul-stirring history of the construction of the two factories, one in the city of New York, and the other in Chicago, “at a cost * * * of several millions of dollars,” and “arranged with special reference to the use of a series of machines and mechanical appliances invented for it, and so connected and placed that, in the process of manufacture, the crackers are carried by descending pans from the ovens on the top floor of the buildings to moving tables on a lower floor, where at the end of said tables are machines which by one stroke so assist in the simultaneous folding of a carton blank and a sheet of paraffin paper that the two become a unitary box structure, calculated to exclude air, moisture, dust, dirt, and vermin,” until they “come along on the .moving tables and their conveyors, and an employee takes whole, selected biscuit and puts them into the open package, just as quickly, easily and accurately as a chord is struck by a musician on an organ or piano, and the biscuit are then touched by human hands for the first and only time until opened in the home of the consumer.” The method of filling the packages, the care to avoid breakages, “neither be too crowded nor too loose,” are elaborately explained, as well as the automatic closing machines, the application of the “red Iner-seal Trade Mark” on each end, the formation of the “bundle,” the placing of the bundle label “showing the legend ‘Uneeda Biscuit, National Biscuit Company,’ ” then “trucked to cars for shipment,” etc., the great value of plates and dies for printing labels and wrappers, the use of the best and highest grades of flour, the resultant “light, crisp and flaky” cracke'r, “which are prime elements of superiority and value.”

After the patient perusal of the foregoing, but little of which is above referred to, there aré about three pages of [302]*302cuts and prints of the different kinds of packages, and, following this, three maps of the United States showing the location and boundary of each state and territory in the Union, excepting Alaska, Hawaii,. Guam, Porto Rico, and the Philippine Islands. Why they are omitted is not explained. The margin of these maps are fairly well filled with legends showing the route of travel.from the factory of supposedly all the different brands of crackers from the “Zu Zu Ginger Snaps” to “Bamum’s Animals.” Among other statements following the foregoing may be noted a reference to the extensive advertising of the “biscuit” and the aggregate of sales for the years 1889 to 1910, and a copious extract from the decision of a federal court upon the subject of the validity of the patent of a carton or wrapper in a cause where the question of an infringement was presented. The importance of that decision upon the questions here presented is not perceived. There is also a synopsis of the pure food laws of the United States and of all the states, which is scarcely deemed of sufficient importance to warrant their inclusion in a stipulation of facts in this case. The foregoing is but a brief epitome of the unimportant and unnecessary portions of the “stipulation.” When we reflect the only purpose of this application is to ascertain if the. provisions of the law of this state, requiring the net weight of the contents of a package to be upon it, shall be observed, the extended “stipulation” would hardly seem necessary. We are wholly unable to conceive why the records of this court should be loaded down with'this great mass of what seems to us to be immaterial matter, to say nothing of consuming the time of the already overworked judges in reading it. An agreed statement of the facts upon which a cause is to be décided should contain nothing but the material facts in issue. More than this is surplusage and worse than redundant.

The material facts in this case differ from those in the two companion cases in that Page is not, strictly speaking, a retail dealer, but is said to be an agent of the foreign [303]*303manfacturer, and is conducting a “distributing house” in the city of Lincoln on behalf of the manufacturer, and is selling the manufactured articles to merchants, and possibly to others, within this state. The material and essential inquiry is as to whether he sells the imported product in the original and unbroken package in which it is shipped from the factories at New York and Chicago to him, or whether he breaks the package and sells the smaller and included packages separately? The decisions,- some of which are cited in In re Agnew, hold that the right to import from another state or nation carries with it the right to sell; but, in order that the property retain its distinctive characteristic of interstate commerce in a sale, it must be sold in the unbroken, identical package as when shipped by the consignor. If the container or package consists of smaller units or packages, and the original or outside package is broken and .the smaller units or packages are sold, the protection of the law of interstate commerce is gone, and the property at once becomes a part of the body of the property of the state and is subject to its laws. This is too well settled to be open to dispute.

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Related

Hoagland v. State
260 N.W. 695 (Nebraska Supreme Court, 1935)
Purchase v. State
191 N.W. 677 (Nebraska Supreme Court, 1922)

Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
131 N.W. 820, 89 Neb. 299, 1911 Neb. LEXIS 214, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/in-re-page-neb-1911.