Court Opinion

ID: 9696017
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 18:33:49.304394+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:20:17.641209
License: Public Domain

Concurring Opinion by
Ms. Justice Musmanno:
On March 4, 1945, Julia Beley made application for a policy of life insurance in the sum of $1,900 on her son Andrew Beley, then a student 17 years of age. The policy, which was issued May 1, 1945, provided, inter alia: “In the event that the Insured engages in military or naval service in the time of war, the liability of the Company shall be limited to the return of the premiums paid hereunder, unless the Insured shall have previously secured from the Company a permit to engage in such service.”
The policy allowed for additional benefits of $1,000 in the event the insured came to his death by accidental means, but under the heading: “Bisks not assumed:” the contract read: “The Company shall not be liable for the additional Accidental Death Benefit specified above if said death shall result by reason of any of the following: (a) . . . (b) . . . (c) . . . (d) Military, air or naval service in time of war. (e) Any work in connection with actual warfare, riot, insurrection, police duties or any act incidental thereto, either on land or water. . . .”
*240On October 28, 1950, Andrew Beley, who had had some previous military experience, was recalled into active service and in due time sailed to embattled Korea where on March 7, 1951, he made the supreme sacrifice.
His mother submitted proofs of death to the insurance company which refused payment under the policy on the ground that her son’s death came within the excepted provisions of the policy.
Mrs. Beley brought suit in assumpsit for $2,000. The company offered to return the premiums paid, which amounted to $152.60, and the Allegheny County Court entered judgment in favor of the plaintiff in that amount. The plaintiff appealed to the Superior Court where the judgment of the Allegheny County Court was reversed and entered in favor of the plaintiff in the full amount of the policy.
The insurance company has appealed to this Court, submitting for our consideration the following questions :
Did Andrew Beley come to his death while in military or naval service in time of war?
Was he at the time of his death engaged in military, air or naval service in time of war?
Was he engaged in any work in connection with actual warfare, riot, insurrection, police duties or any act incidental thereto, either on land or water?
In discussing the principles of law involved in this case, we must assert at once that to deny that the Korean military action is war in its popularly accepted meaning is to deny the evidence of one’s senses. Courts normally take judicial notice of whatever is unquestioningly accepted by informed society as fact. A judge does not ask in court for proof that ice forms at the North Pole or that the World Series refers to a contest between baseball teams. Courts know that in Korea, armies are pitted against each other utilizing *241every device known to modern warfare in the effort and determination to exterminate each other. We know this to be true because every medium of communication extant informs us that it is true. There is not one voice, one printed word, or one picture in the newspapers, radio broadcasts and television images which present themselves before our eyes or appeal to our ears that bespeaks anything to the contrary. In addition, judges have physically seen soldiers who have returned from Korea and have witnessed the evidence of their contact with forces which have inflicted wounds peculiarly the result of gunfire and cannon fire, the trademark of war.
Judges have seen, through the media of incontestible authenticity, photographic evidence of flag-draped caskets being returned by ship from the distant peninsula of Korea. Figures released by the United States Government, through official reports which the courts accept unless controverted (and there has been no denial anywhere of their accuracy), establish that our casualties in Korea have reached the dreadful total of more than 128,000, of Avhich 22,519 represent deaths. Nothing can more graphically identify conflict as war than grave casualties of this awesome character.
And yet, the Spanish American war, which is accepted governmentally and historically and in every other manner as a full-scaled war, produced the relatively small number of 361 battle deaths and 2,565 deaths by disease. The total casualties reached, again comparatively, the small number of 4,506. The number of American troops engaged was 306,760.
However, even the loss of one life or none at all, if there be a solemn declaration of war, makes any military action, war. Congress is the only body in the United States which can declare Avar. The Korea conflict is a non-congressionally declared war. Does that *242in itself make it legally different from a congressionally declared war? The answer to that question is the answer to the question posed in this lawsuit.
As early as 1800, the Supreme Court of the United States, in the case of Bas v. Tingy, 4 Dallas 35, 38, drew a distinction between a declared or solemn war and an undeclared or imperfect war: “If it be declared in form, it is called solemn, and is of the perfect kind; because one whole nation is at war with another whole nation; and all the members of the nation declaring war, are authorized to commit hostilities against all the members of the other, in every place, and under every circumstance. In such a war all the members act under a general authority, and all the rights and consequences of war attach to their condition.
“But hostilities may subsist between two nation, more confined in its nature and extent; being limited as to places, persons, and things; and this is more properly termed imperfect war; because not solemn, and because those who are authorized to commit hostilities, act under special authority, and can go no farther than to the extent of their commission.”
In 1866 the Supreme Court of Texas, discussing the Civil War, said in Bishop v. Jones & Petty, 28 Tex. 294, 319: “War in its legal sense has been aptly defined to be ‘the state of nations among whom there is an interruption of all pacific relations, and a general contestation of arms authorized by the sovereign.’ It is true, it may and has frequently in latter times been commenced and carried on without either a notice or declaration. But still, there can be no war by its government, of which the court can take judicial knowledge, until there has been some act or declaration creating or recognizing its existence by that department of the government clothed with the war-making power.”
War, as defined by Corpus Juris, must “. . . be an *243armed struggle carried on between two political bodies each of which exercises de facto authority over persons within a determinate territory, and its existence is determined by the authorized political department of the government. 8o, lawful war can never exist without the actual concurrence of the war-malcing power, but may exist prior to any contest of the armed forces. The courts are bound by a declaration or determination by the proper department of government that a war exists, while until there has been been such a declaration or determination the courts cannot take judicial notice of the existence of a war by their government.” (67 C.J. 336). (Emphasis supplied)
This authority says further: “A court cannot, however, take judicial notice of a war by its government until there has been some act or declaration creating or recognizing the existence of war by the department of the government clothed with the war-making power.” (67 C.J. 338).
On February 20, 1951, the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the United States House of Representatives released a report (House Report No. 127) which officially refers to the operation in Korea not as war but as Action in Korea. Specifically it states: “No declaration of war has been made by the Congress. The President has not proclaimed a state of war, nor have the North Korean or Chinese Communists authorities.”
If the drafters of the contract of insurance which was sold to the plaintiff here intended the word War used therein to be interpreted in its constitutional sense, the plaintiff is entitled to recover, since the action which brought about the death of Andrew Beley was not within the purport of the exclusionary clause. The task of the judiciary in this case lias been not to define the word War in its broad general application but what it was intended to mean by the parties to *244the contract, in the light of the history and the circumstances of the time.
The word War has many meanings. In addition to being an armed conflict, it may be defined as an act of opposition, as an inimical contest, as hostility and strife. It may have a locale not ordinarily associated with its gunpowder connotation, as, for instance, Milton speaks of “impious war in heaven,” and in Psalms (lv. 21) we find: “The words of his mouth were smoother than butter but war was in his heart.” The word War may take' on. still further meanings when conjoined to another word Avhich has acquired a particular significance because of the history of the times. Thus, the phrase Cold War has painted a canvas of dramatic and tragic scope and depth beyond the capacity of imagination a decade ago.
The question presented by this case has not definitively been passed upon, so far as research can ascertain, by any court of last resort in the United States. However, various decisions have lifted lanterns of light on the seeming paradoxical query as to whether the conflict in Korea is War or not. The decision in the case of New York Life Ins. Co. v. Durham, 166 F. 2d 874, sheds its own particular beam of analysis on the subject. There, the New York Life Insurance Company, on December 1, 1943, issued a policy of insurance on the life of Lewis Durham conditioned that the amount payable should be restricted if the death of insured should occur “ ‘outside the home areas while the insured is in the military or naval forces of any country engaged in war . . . “war” includes undeclared war.’ ” On September 25, 1945, while the policy was in full force and effect, and the insured was in the military forces of the United States, he died outside the home areas from wholly non-military causes. The Insurance Company denied liability for the face amount *245of the policy, contending that the death of the insured came within the excluding provisions of the policy. The lower court entered a judgment in favor of the plaintiff in the full face value of the policy and the Circuit Court of Appeals, Tenth Circuit, on March 4, 1948, affirmed the judgment, on the basis that as the death of the insured occurred after the surrender of the enemy, even though no treaty of peace had been signed, the insured “was not in the service of a ‘country engaged in war’, as those words were used to measure coverage in the insurance contract.”
The Court did say in that case that “The existence of war and restoration of peace are determined solely by the political departments of our Government, and such determinations are conclusively binding upon the Courts in all matters of state or public concern, and war having been declared, its existence must be recognized by the Courts until peace is proclaimed, although actual warfare may have ceased.” Nonetheless, the Court went on to say that: . . . “in all private matters, unaffected by public interest, the parties are undoubtedly free to contract with reference to war and to give it such definition, connotation and meaning, as does not infringe upon public policy” (Emphasis supplied.)
When this case came before the Allegheny County Court, the learned Judge Loran Lewis of that Court filed a dissenting opinion in which he appropriately said: “If the word ‘war’ was to include every type of hostility that might occur between the armed forces of different nations without an open declaration of war, then the insured could not possibly know whether his beneficiary would be protected if he met his death while hostilities were going on. The company could not possibly know what their liability would be under the contract until some court decided if the hostilities referred to constituted a ‘war’.”
*246“I do not believe tbe insured or the company intended to enter into any such guessing contest as to what their legal rights were under the policy.”
I agree with Judge Lewis that the adjudication of the rights of the contending parties cannot be ascertained through the process of conjecture or chance. The insurance company, whose attorneys wrote the contract, must stand by the words employed by their agents; and in this connection War, in the contemplation of the law of the United States, can only mean war declared by the only authority that can declare it, i.e., Congress.
If we were to denominate as war all foreign actions in which United States military forces have been engaged, we would have to conclude that the United States has practically never been at peace in the history of our country. From 1798 to 1952- the United States has used armed forces abroad some 150 times.1 Some of these actions, of course, involved no casualties but many of them did. But it is not the number of casualties which decides whether or not a foreign military action is a “legal” war or not. No one would have seriously contended that the slight commitments of American troops on June 27, 1950, to the Korean action, constituted war. Nor would authorities on international law have declared that the American action in Korea a month later constituted war. If the Korean action was not war on June 27 or July 27, when did it become war? Five months later? A year later? When?
Would the appellant insurance company argue that the military action became war when the casualties reached a certain figure, say, 5,000 or 10,000? Would it argue that the action certainly was war when the *247casualties mounted to 50,000? And if we assume that a certain degree on the metamorphieal thermometer of casualties marked the point at which the military action became war, who would determine when that point was reached? The courts certainly could not declare that point of demarcation, and there is no law which provides for such an arbitrary determination of what constitutes war. Nor could it be argued successfully that a military action becomes war when a certain period of time has elapsed, since there is no constitutional or statutory basis for such an automatic chronological determination. The courts interpret law and construe facts; they cannot make facts, and that is what, in effect, the appellant would have us do by asking that we decide when the military action in Korea passed from a military action into a legal or constitutional war.
If the logic of the appellant insurance company were to be accepted in application to history, then the Pershing Punitive Expedition into Mexico, the Boxer Expedition into China, the many Nicaraguan Marine expeditions and others of that character, all involving American casualties, would have to be regarded as wars. But no historian would agree with such a conclusion.
There can be acts of war without there being a state of war. Beley was killed by an aet of war but not in a state of war. The case of New York Life Ins. Co. v. Bennion, 158 F. 2d 260, is illustrative of this proposition. Captain Bennion, commanding the battleship West Virginia, was killed at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, at the time of the Japanese sneak attack. War against Japan was. not declared until the following day. The insurance policy on Captain Bennion’s life did not covér “undeclared war” and the court of first instance allowed recovery on the policy. The Circuit Court of Appeals, however, reversed the judgment because the policy . .excluded, coverage for death *248resulting from “war or any act incident thereto”. (Emphasis supplied). The attack of December 7th was certainly an act incident to war even though the state of war had not come into being.
Commenting on this decision later on, in the case of New York Life Insurance Co. v. Durham, supra, the Circuit Court added this illuminating observation: “. . . while recognizing that the existence of a state of war was a political question to be determined solely by the political departments, we were nonetheless of the opinion that the political determination of the commencement of war was immaterial if the parties to the private contract, clearly intended that war should have a different meaning. When the contract was viewed in its context and the manifest intent of the parties ascertained, we were of the opinion that they contracted with reference to war in its real and practical sense; that is, its hazards to human life, and that the Courts were not required to ‘affect a technical ignorance’ of actualities.” For that reason, as already indicated, the Court held that the attack on Pearl Harbor, before the formal declaration of war was “war or an act incident thereto” within the meaning of the insurance contract, which used those exclusionary words.
In the case of Harding v. Pennsylvania Mutual Life Ins. Co., 171 Pa. Superior Ct. 236, which is recognized as a companion case to the one at bar, the Superior Court held against thé insurance company’s contention, practically identical:with the one-advanced here. The learned Judge Dithrioh of the Pennsylvania Superior Court, in a very interesting and able opinion, said: “Since ‘war’ is a word which has been held to import various -.meanings, it is incumbent upon the insurer to make clear that it applies to undeclared war, as well as to declared war, for .even if the: action in Korea *249should be held to be war, it is at most an undeclared war. In our opinion the insurer has failed to meet the burden cast upon it. The attempt of the appellee to evade liability of double indemnity should not receive judicial condonation. The phraseology of the policy was chosen by the insurer and tendered in fixed form to the prospective policyholder, and since its language is reasonably open to two constructions, we will adopt that construction which is more favorable to the insured.”
Judge Dithrich also directed a very appropriate query in the direction of the insurance company, namely, “if the insurer did not intend to use the word “war” in its technical and legal sense, i.e., war declared by Congress, but intended it to include undeclared war as well, why was that provision not inserted in the contract”? Further: “The contract presumably was prepared by competent insurance company attorneys, who, no doubt, were familiar with the most recent decisions relating to war risk provisions in insurance contracts; and if the appellee did not intend to assume risks growing out of hostilities short of war it could have so provided by extending the phrase ‘in time of war’ to include undeclared war.”
In the case of West v. Palmetto State Life Ins. Co., 202 S. C. 422, 25 S.E. 2d 475, the insured was, like Captain Bennion, also killed at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. His insurance policy carried the provision that double indemnity for accidental death would not be payable in the event that death should occur while the insured was “engaged in military or naval service in time of war.” In allowing recovery, the Supréme Court of South Carolina pointed out that the exclusionary provisions in the insurance policies under consideration were written in contemplation of the law of the United States under which. only Congress may declare war, which of course it had not done *250at the time of the bomber attack on our fleet at Pearl Harbor. Thus, the Japanese aerial assault of December 7, 1941, “did not constitute war in the legal sense or within the meaning thereof intended in the policies.” The Court also took judicial notice of the fact that at the time of the Pearl Harbor aggression high diplomatic representatives of Japan were conferring with the President and Secretary of State of the United States, “professedly in an effort to preserve peace, from which, and the other facts of record, it was found that a state of war did not at that time exist between the two nations.”
After quoting from various authorities, the Court said: “It is seen from the foregoing authorities that the declaration by Congress of war on Japan on December 8 was the only legal way in which this country could be placed in a state of war with that aggressor nation. The Constitution so provides, Art. 1, §8, supra. That the policy contracts were entered into by the parties in contemplation of that clear law, and subject to it, cannot be denied; and they are bound by it." (Emphasis supplied.)
It can only be assumed in the case at bar that the parties accepted the insurance contract in May, 1945, “in contemplation of the law of the United States under which only Congress can declare war.”
If the Beley insurance contract had included the phrase “undeclared war,” which the Korean conflict indubitably is, no problem would have arisen because the Korean conflict, in the constitutional sense, indubitably is an undeclared war. • However, since that phrase does not appear in the contract, we are compelled to unclasp the book of history óf 1945 and scan the pages of the. times. immediately, .preceding, and surrounding the writing of the contract. .....
In May, 1945, the shadows of the pending complete and unequivocal defeat of Germany and Japan had *251fallen over the globe. The United Nations was also an assured reality even though officially and definitively it did not come into being until October 24, 1945. The United Nations sprang from the resolutions in the hearts of the peoples of the world: “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.”
The three main bodies of the United Nations are the General Assembly, the International Court of Justice and the Security Council. The Security Council consists of eleven nation-members. It is one of the main functions of the Security Council to: (Art. 39) “. . . determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of agression and shall make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken in accordance with Articles 41 and 42, to maintain or restore international peace and security.”
Article 42 of the Charter provides as follows: “Should the Security Council consider that measures provided for in Article 41 would be inadequate or have proved to be inadequate, it may take such action by air, sea, or land forces as may be necessary to maintain or restore international peace and security. Such action may include demonstrations, blockade, and other operations by air, sea, or land forces of Members of the United Nations.”
Paragraphs 1 and 2 of Article 43, provide: “1. All Members of the United Nations, in order to contribute to the maintenance of international peace and security, undertake to make available to the Security Council, on its call and in accordance with a special agreement or agreements, armed forces, assistance, and facilities, including rights of passage, necessary for the purposes of maintaining international peace and security.
“2. Such agreement or agreements shall govern the numbers and types of forces, their degree of readiness *252and general location, and the nature of the facilities and assistance to he provided.”
For five thousand years of recorded history the earth has run red with the blood of war. The people of the various nations convulsed by these wars were powerless to resist the orders of kings, queens, kaisers, sultans, emperors, pashas and other absolutists, who ordered them into battle in order to achieve land, loot, power or glory or even to satisfy sadistic whim or caprice entirely foreign to the welfare of those who did the fighting.
Following the termination of each war the monarchs or chieftains returned to their respective thrones or tribal mansions, leaving the dead to bury their dead and the maimed and crippled to manage their misery as best they could. No impartial attempt was ever made, by any responsible body, after each vast outpouring of blood, to determine who was right and who was wrong, because both sides in so catastrophic a voluntary enterprise could not have been in the right.
Humanity had been crucified between the thieves of Arrogance and Greed, and yet there was no adjudication anywhere as to who was guilty for driving the nails.
From time to time mankind pleaded for a cessation of this licentious extermination. Societies of brothers were formed, pledged against armed conflict, religious bodies held aloft the holy symbols of peace, but these societies and organizations were scattered and trampled under the galloping hooves of Conquest and Domination when tyrants drew the sword to carve for themselves greater territories and greater power.
In 1918, after a world war which killed off more than 15,000,000 persons and took many nations to the brink of physical disaster and moral bankruptcy, wise and noble heads invited the peoples of the world, sprawled in the dust and debris of the ruined temple of sacred human life, to rise and join together in the formation of a world understanding. The people realized that in *253wars of this character they were the ones who were always the losers, whether on the so-called winning side or on the losing side, and they evinced a great willingness for an international organization that would insure that peace even if paradoxically it had to be accomplished by force.
And the League of Nations was formed.
A towering lamp to light up the criminal folly of war, no matter where or how begun, rose above the highest mountains and the highest nationalistic prides and prejudices, but in the absence of the United States to replenish the moral and material oil in this beacon, the light burned low and in the succeeding darkness, a psycopathic paperhanger stole away again the gem of peace and the jewel of world understanding.
Adolf Hitler would never have been able to insult, threaten and finally challenge the world to a contest in blood and intestines if the League of Nations had spoken with the authority it possessed. Had the United States been a member of that global assembly, a strait jacket would have been thrown around the Nazi madman at his first predatory move, and World War II would have been only a subject for fantastically imaginative writers.
When this most gigantic of all wars had run its bloody course, an international agreement established a tribunal to adjudicate the guilt or innocence of those charged with having precipitated the holocaust which wiped out more than 30,000,000 of the world’s population, reduced nations to ruin and rubble, and introduced into language the most horrible word since man babbled to man — that of genocide. The tribunal was also to expose to the world the workings of the most brutal engine ever devised for the production of misery and horror — the concentration camp and exterminating oven.
*254That tribunal heard evidence, reviewed events, studied the plots and plans of those who wrought this incredible havoc to earth and man, and, after rendering judgment against the responsible individuals, formally pronounced that War is evil because “its consequences are not confined to the belligerent States alone, but affects the whole world.”
It declared further that “to initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evils of the whole.”
To forestall that another aggressive war with all its even more deadly and terrorsome machinery of destruction could now conceivably erase civilization completely and blot out life itself from the planet earth, representatives from all parts of the world entered into that compact which, we have seen, is the United Nations. The sixty nations, which now constitute the United Nations, all have their own individual flag, but each lends a ray or tint into making up the supreme banner— the banner of Peace.
In the latter part of 1950 Andrew Beley sailed from the shores of America under that banner. He wore a soldier’s uniform, he bore a soldier’s arms, he was skilled in the art and science of war but his mission was Peace. Never was a sword drawn, a cannon fired or a bullet discharged in a worthier cause than that to which Andrew Beley dedicated himself as he neared the bleak and gnarled land of Korea. And never did one offer a holier tribute to that cause than did Andrew Beley when on March 7, 1951, he gave his life for peace and the preservation of the liberties which every American understands in the word Peace.
The participation of the United States in the Korean affair had but one object and but one purpose — Peace. *255Peace not merely for today but for all time. Of course, this same thing has been said during other international conflicts but we have seen how permanent peace was never achieved because of the failure of a strong enough world federation to enforce upon nations the obligations they had voluntarily assumed.
The Soviet Union is a voluntary signatory to the charter of the United Nations. The Soviet Union has violated the letter and the spirit of its obligations under the United Nations charter by directing the attack of North Korea on South Korea, and by lending material aid to the aggressive war being waged by North Korea and Red China against South Korea.
For the United Nations to have shirked its legal responsibilities under Article 42 of the Charter would have been to betray all mankind. To have failed to resist the North Korean Communist aggression would have meant to repudiate Article 42. To repudiate Article 42 would be to abandon the whole purpose of the United Nations, and to throw the peoples of the world back into the bloody pit of suicidal war.
To have yielded to the Communist aggression in June, 1950, would have meant to invite similar and more wide-sweeping aggressions in Asia and Europe.
As stated by Judge Lewis in his learned opinion (supra): “The invasion of the North Korean troops was a definite act of aggression and a threat to world peace. Unless the United Nations prevented such a threat to peace it would collapse as an international force.”
Korea is the test of the human race to live by reason and not by force, to settle differences in the scales of justice and not in the muzzles of cannon. If this test fails in Korea, civilization is doomed. Winning the test does not mean militarily winning or losing the conflict; it means a never-yielding and unflagging upholding of the principle that aggressive war is the supreme *256crime, the crime that can never be condoned or its unspeakable consequences palliated.
Americans generally believed in 1945 that the blossomtime of Hope had arrived, and that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse would never again gallop their martial steeds across the bleeding face of the earth. We had reason to believe that with the world assembled in the Parliament of Man, the war clause in our own Constitution could conceivably gradually become obsolete. Expeditionary missions there would be; the enforcement of the decisions of the United Nations would entail the commitment of groups of our armed forces, together with those of other nations, to remote crossroads on the globe, but full-scaled wars — with the United States alone on one side and another or other nations on the other side — was a possibility that we believed was melting rapidly in the crucible of international amity.
It was against that background of general understanding, (whether the drafters of the Beley insurance policy consciously realized it or not,) that the contract here before us was written. And it may well be that, because of our responsibilities under the Charter of the United Nations, Congress will never be called upon again to declare war in its originally accepted significance. According to Article 39, supra, the Security Council “shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of agression, and shall make recommendations.” Since defensive war on our part could only come about through aggression against us (which subject matter is now in the exclusive hands of.the United Nations) and since we would never wage an aggressive war ourselves, it' is exceedingly problematical that there ever would be another occasion for Congress to declare war except merely to confirm action already agreed upon by the United Nations.
*257It might be that, in this new state of affairs, an amendment to the Constitution will be in order to assign to Congress the sole power to determine when our military forces are to be used in implementing a decision of the United Nations Security Council. Obviously, under present constitutional interpretation superimposed over current international obligations, the President can commit our armed forces into military actions on a scale which can equal and even surpass in magnitude the congressionally declared wars of the past. Whether the people of the nation desire that this shall remain a fixed attribute of the executive power of government, thus vitally curtailing the powers of the legislative branch of our government, is a matter for serious concern. However, this is simply an observation of the writer not needed to the adjudication of this case.
From all the above, I conclude that Andrew Beley did not come to his death as the result of a state of War as contemplated by the contracting parties and that, therefore, the plaintiff is entitled to recover the full value of the policy.
I would, therefore, affirm the judgment of the Superior Court.

 House Report No. 127, pp. 55-62.