Gilson v. Delaware & H. Canal Co.
| Decision Date | 22 December 1892 |
| Citation | 26 A. 70,65 Vt. 213 |
| Parties | E. P. GILSON, RECEIVER v. DELAWARE & HUDSON CANAL CO |
| Court | Vermont Supreme Court |
GENERAL TERM, 1892
Case for the diversion of a water-course by the defendant, whereby the plaintiff's quarry became flooded. Plea, the general issue. Trial by jury at the September term, 1891, Rutland county, THOMPSON, J., presiding. Verdict and judgment for the plaintiff. The defendant excepts.
Judgment affirmed.
C A. Prouty for defendant.
It is a maxim of the law that the immediate, not the remote, cause of an event is regarded. In the application of this maxim the law rejects, as not constituting ground for an action, damage not flowing proximately from the act complained of. In other words, the law always refers the damage to the proximate, not to the remote, cause.
It is laid down in many cases and by leading text-writers, that in order to warrant a finding that negligence or an act not amounting to wanton wrong is the proximate cause of an injury, it must appear that the injury was the natural and probable sequence of the negligence or the wrongful act, and that it was such as might, or ought to, have been foreseen in the light of the attending circumstances. But this rule is no test in cases where no intervening efficient cause is found between the original wrongful act and the injurious consequences complained of, and in which such consequences, although not probable, have actually flowed in unbroken sequence from the original wrongful act. This is well illustrated by Stevens v Dudley, 56 Vt. 158, which was this: Defendant was a marshal at a fair, and in clearing the track for a race he turned off a man's team so negligently that the man was thrown from his wagon, his horse broke loose and ran against plaintiff's wagon and injured him. The court below charged that defendant was not liable unless he might reasonably have expected plaintiff's injury to result from his act. Held error, and that the court should have charged that if the defendant negligently turned the team off the track, and thereby the team was deprived of the control of a driver and became frightened and ran over plaintiff's team and caused the injury, without any superior, uncontrollable force, or without the negligence of a responsible agent having intervened, the defendant would be liable, although he did not anticipate, and might not have anticipated, such consequences from his negligent act. In other words, that the court should have charged that if defendant's act was negligent, and in the natural order of cause and effect the plaintiff was injured thereby, the defendant was liable. Smith v. The London & Southwestern Railway Co., L. R. 6, C. P. 14, in the Exchequer Chamber, is to the same effect. There the company's workmen, after cutting the grass and trimming the hedges bordering the railway, placed the trimmings
in heaps between the hedge and the line, and allowed them to remain there for several days during very dry weather, which had continued for some weeks. A fire broke out between the hedge and the rails and burnt some of the heaps of trimmings and the hedge, and spread to a stubble field beyond, and was thence carried by a high wind across the stubble field and over a road, and burnt plaintiff's cottage two hundred yards away from where the fire began. There was evidence that an engine had passed the spot shortly before the fire was first seen but no evidence that it had emitted sparks, nor any further evidence that the fire originated from the engine, nor was there any evidence that the fire began in the heaps of trimmings and not on the parched ground around them. The court below held that the plaintiff could not recover, because no reasonable man would have foreseen that the fire would consume the hedge and pass across a stubble field, and so get to plaintiff's cottage at a distance of two hundred yards from the railway, crossing a road in its passage. In the Exchequer Chamber, Chief Baron Kelley said that he felt pressed at first by this view, because he then and still thought that any reasonable man might well have failed to anticipate such a concurrence of circumstances as the case presented; but that on consideration he thought that was not the true test of defendant's liability; that it might be that defendant did not anticipate, and was not bound to anticipate, that plaintiff's cottage would be burnt as the result of its...
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