B. & O. Employees' Rel. Ass'n v. Post

Citations

• 122 Pa. 579
• 15 A. 885
• 1888 Pa. LEXIS 634

Syllabus

<p>1. Where the rules of a railroad employees’relief association authorize the dues of members to be collected by stoppage out of their monthly pay by the railroad company, the declarations of a paymaster that a deduction has been made from an employee’s pay are insufficient to establish the membership of the latter in the association.</p> <p>2. An agent's authority cannot bo shown by proof of his declarations; and, in order that a party who will avail himself of the act of an agent may prove his declarations, to bind his principal, the burden lies upon him to prove the authority under which the agent acted, and that the declarations were within its limits.</p> <p>8. But the paymaster of a railroad company, who is but a mere servant, with no discretion and with no duties to perform that are not purely ministerial, is not an agent of the railroad company, much less of an employees’ relief association, so as to hind either by his declarations relating to a past occurrence.</p> <p>4 It, is error, in an action against such association to recover weekly benefits as a member, to exclude the testimony of the medical examiner that the plaintiffs application had been stopped in witness’s hands, and plaintiff had never been accepted as a member of the association,</p> <p>o. In such an action, the measure of damages, if any are recoverable, being the stipulated sum the plaintiff would he entitled to, under the charter and by-laws of the association, up t.o the time when the writ issued, an offer of proof of the plaintiff’s expectation of life is irrelevant.</p> <p>6. The phrase, total inability to labor, in the constitution and laws of such an association, must be held to mean a total inability to earn a livelihood at any employment, and not restricted to a particular trade, or the employment in which a memuor is engaged at the time of his injury.</p>