Beaupre v. Pacific & Atlantic Telegraph Co.

• Decision Date: 16 December 1874
• Parties: BRUNO BEAUPRE & another <I>vs.</I> PACIFIC & ATLANTIC TELEGRAPH COMPANY.
• Court: Minnesota Supreme Court

Page 155

21 Minn. 155

BRUNO BEAUPRE & anothervs.

PACIFIC & ATLANTIC TELEGRAPH COMPANY.

Supreme Court of Minnesota.

December 16, 1874.

Plaintiffs brought this action in the court of common pleas for Ramsey county to recover the sum of $250, with interest from July 15, 1870, being the damages alleged to have been sustained by them in consequence of the defendant's negligent delay in transmitting a message. The action was referred to R. B. Galusha, Esq., who found the following facts, which were alleged in the complaint: The plaintiffs, at all the times hereinafter mentioned were, and now are, partners under the firm name of Beaupré & Kelly, and the defendant was and is a corporation, etc., engaged in the business of transmitting messages by electric telegraph from and to different places in the United States, and particularly the city of St. Paul in this state and Dubuque in the state of Iowa, for hire and reward. On July 15, 1870, and for more than one month thereafter, one William Ryan was a dealer in pork at wholesale at Dubuque. On July 12, 1870, the plaintiffs sent by mail to Ryan the following letter, viz "St. Paul, July 12, 1870. Wm. Ryan: Dear Sir: Have you any more northwestern mess pork or prime mess, also extra mess? Telegraph price on receipt of this;" which letter was received, on or prior to, July 15, by Ryan, who on the last named day sent the following message by telegraph to the plaintiffs: "Dubuque, July 15, 1870, Beaupre & Kelly: Letter received. No light mess here. Extra mess twenty-eight seventy-five (28.75)." This dispatch was received by the plaintiffs on the day of its date, and on the same day (July 15) at about six o'clock in the afternoon, the plaintiff delivered to the defendant, at its office in St. Paul, the following message, directed to Ryan: "July 15, 1870. William Ryan, Dubuque: Dispatch received. Will take two hundred extra mess, price named. Beaupré & Kelly:" which message was marked by the plaintiffs, and intended to be forwarded as a night message. The defendant was informed of the contents and purport of this message, and was requested to forward it without delay. The plaintiffs paid to the defendant the sum of twenty-five cents, in consideration whereof the defendant promised and undertook to forward the message to Ryan, as requested by the plaintiffs. The defendant made no attempt to transmit the message to Ryan, by its own or any other telegraph line, until the morning of July 16, and did not inform plaintiffs of such delay. On the evening of July 15, a rain and wind storm, accompanied with heavy lightning, arose at St. Paul at half past seven P. M., lasting until after ten o'clock, making it impossible to transmit the message by the defendant's line after half past seven P. M. The defendant did not transmit and deliver the message to Ryan at Dubuque until July 19, 1870.

The market price of extra mess pork on July 15, was $28.75 per barrel, but from the morning of July 16 to July 19, 1870, the market price advanced one dollar and twenty-five cents per barrel, and on the receipt of the message, (on July 19,) Ryan refused to furnish plaintiffs said two hundred barrels of extra mess pork at the price of $28.75 per barrel, or for less than $30.00 per barrel. The plaintiffs required the pork in carrying on their business, and were compelled to, and did, pay for said two hundred barrels of pork $30.00 per barrel, which was the lowest market price for such pork on and after July 19, 1870, and up to the time the plaintiffs purchased the same, plaintiffs having relied on their dispatch to obtain such pork.

It is the custom of defendant and other telegraph companies to send "night dispatches," so called, after the hour of six o'clock P. M., and during the evening until the close of business hours of each night, at ten o'clock P. M.; and it is the custom to deliver such night dispatches on the following morning; but the plaintiffs were not informed of this custom. The price for night dispatches or messages is one half the price charged for sending "day messages," so called.

All other allegations in the complaint, the referee found not proved.

As conclusions of law, the referee found that the defendant was negligent in not sending the plaintiffs' message to Ryan on July 15; that there was reasonable time to have forwarded or transmitted it prior to the storm before mentioned; and that plaintiffs had been damaged by such negligent conduct of the defendant in the amount of twenty-five cents, being the amount paid by plaintiffs to defendant for transmitting the message, for which sum, with disbursements, he ordered judgment.

On the coming in of the referee's report, the defendant moved for judgment in its favor, and the plaintiffs moved for judgment for the amount claimed in the complaint. The latter motion was granted by the court, Hall, J., presiding, and judgment was entered accordingly, from which the defendant appeals.

I. V. D. Heard, for appellant.

Davis & O'Brien, for respondents.

YOUNG, J.

The plaintiffs' right to recover the damages allowed them by the court below, must be tried by the well established rule that "the damages which a party to a contract ought to recover in respect of a breach of it by the other, are such as arise naturally from the breach itself, or such as may reasonably be supposed to have been contemplated by the parties, when making the contract, as the probable result of the breach." Hadley v. Baxendale, 9 Exch. 341; Squire v. W. U. Tel. Co., 98 Mass. 232; True v. Internat. Tel. Co., 60 Maine, 9; Paine v. Sherwood, 19 Minn. 315, 324. The damages must, moreover, be certain, both in their nature, and in respect of the cause from which they proceed. They must not be the remote, but proximate, consequence of the breach of contract, and must not be speculative or contingent. Griffin v. Colver, 16 N. Y. 489, 495.

The plaintiffs, in their complaint, treat Ryan's dispatch as an offer to sell such quantity of pork as they might order, at the price therein named, and their own message as an acceptance of such offer, and an agreement on their part to take two hundred barrels at that price. If such were the character of these dispatches, then the plaintiffs' message, if seasonably delivered, would have effected a valid executory contract of sale, by which Ryan would be bound to furnish the pork contracted for, at the contract price; the case would then be similar to Squire v. W. U. Tel. Co., and True v. Internat. Tel. Co., (supra,) in each of which the dispatch negligently delayed by the company was, and on its face purported to be, an acceptance of an offer to sell specific merchandise, and if seasonably delivered, would have completed a sale by which the property in such merchandise would have passed at once to the plaintiff. In those cases, it was held, consistently with the rules above stated, that the measure of damages should be the difference between the price the plaintiff agreed to pay by the delayed message, and the sum which the plaintiff, using due diligence, would have been compelled to pay, at the same place, in order to purchase...