SYDNEY BULLETIN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLI, Issue 12544, 11 April 1904, Page 7

SYDNEY BULLETIN.

SLASHING COMMENTS ON A RECENT CASE OF GENERAL INTEREST. The Sydney Bulletin, in its characteristic style, has just attacked a very common pieceof dishonesty, taking for its text a law case in Melbourne the previous week. The Bulletin whatever its faults may be, is always fearless and independent. It has a well deserved reputation for sizing a ease up in a few words, and its editor has done so here:— Chemist John Digby, who has several shops scattered over suburban Melbourne, has been up to one of the oldest and riskiest tricks of his very tricky trade. He has been playing the old game of substitution, and was burned pretty badly in Justice Hood's Court the other day. For months he had been bamboozling his pink pill customers with the. well-worn story that he had in bulk some pills which were 'just- the same as' Dr. Williams', at a fraction of tho price. Wonder why this piece of fraudulent impertinence thrives so well in the drug trade? It is much tho same as if one asked at a bookstall for a novel by George Meredith, and was urged by the beardless youth behind the counter to take one byMarie Corelli instead. 'It is really just as good, and ever so much more for the money.' The impertinence of the insinuating chemist's clerk is just about as bad in its way. Digby pave his customers tho imitation, but Justice Hood gave Digby tho genuine article. There were half a dozen witnesses in Court ready I to swear, with dates and all the details com- ! plete, that the fraud Lad licen perpetrated repeatedly by Digby himself and his assistants. The official analyst was also on hand to testify that his ' just a-- good' pills contained only one or two of the ingredients, and had none of the medicinal properties of ' tho genuine. When Digby saw the array ol i evidence he sought a settlement. The pink i pill people then let him down lightly. Justice j Hood granted the injunction and awarded ' thorn £50 damages and costs, which will probably run into several hundred pounds. ; Time was given to Digby to pay. If imita- . tors generally got more of this sauce there j would soon be a roaring trade for Judge j Molesworlh and his bankruptcy associates jin the other colonics. There is some- prosI pect of this, as Dr. Williams intimated that I there were a couple more chemists to put I through their facings at once, and more I evidence is being collected against others ! who are adopting the plan of getting- rich ! quickly by living on the other fellow* reputation." In these days, when everything from soap to steam engines and from pills to pianos are sold under the proprietary name of a make! whose name is a guarantee of high quality, it is necessary to be constantly on guard acrainst the unscrupulous imitator with something "just as good." The fact that the majority of dealers are honest makes it all the easier for the others to score on those customers who let' themselves be cajoled into taking substitutes. The Melbourne judgment, reported by the Bulletin, now establishes the interesting point that a shopkeeper must give the genuine pills of Dr. Williams' manufacture if a customer asks simply for "pink pills"—as these two words are held to have become a trade mark by continual usage. In connection with the same line, by the way, there are a great many complaint? in New Zealand just now about some shop* palming off on their customers a bare-faced but worthless foreign substitute in glass bottles. It is only to bo expacted that these people will be •proceeded against next.