Fennerstein's Champagne

Mr. D. B. Eaton, for the claimant: The theory of the law of evidence, on which these letters were received, would seem to have been this: that when the question is, whether there is a market price for an article, and what the same is at a specific time and in a given city, in a foreign country, the facts relative thereto may be proved by reading in evidence whatever any manufacturer of the article referred to has written on the subject at any time, within about a year of the date in question, to anybody else in any part of the world; and that this may be done when all the letters to which those read are responses, are withheld; when, for aught that appears, those letters were mere decoys, written to bring back a particular reply to be used in evidence; when no account is given of the persons to whom the letters offered in evidence purport to be addressed and when the name (Mr. Amos Hill, in this one case), may be a pseudonyme merely. Is this court ready to declare, in solemn decision, such a theory of evidence, a true one? Independently of all the objections which in the case of Cliquot's Champagne were made to certain Prices-Current there offered, and which apply as well to these letters, the objection of res inter alios acta has direct and the strongest bearing.