65 Vt. 213 | Vt. | 1892
The opinion of the court was delivered by
It is a maxim of the law that the immediate, not the remote, causé 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,
In Rylands v. Fletcher, L. R. 3 Ex. 352, in the House of Eords, Lord Cranworth says that in considering whether a defendant is liable to a plaintiff for damage that the latter has sustained, the question in general is, not whether the defendant has acted with due care and caution, but whether his acts occasioned the damage; that this is all well explained in the old case of Lambert v. Bessey, reported by Sir Thomas Raymond; that the doctrine is founded in good sense; for where one, in managing his own affairs, causes, however innocently, damage to another, it is obviously only just that he should be the party to suffer ; that he is bound so to use his own as not to injure.another.
In Smith v. Fletcher, L. R. 7 Exch. Cases, 305, defendants’ mines adjoined and communicated with plaintiff’s mines, and on the surface of defendants’ land were certain hollows and openings, partly caused by defendants’ workings and partly made to facilitate them. Across the surface of defendants’ land there ran a brook, which they had diverted from its original course into an artificial channel they had made, and which by reason of exceptionally heavy rains overflowed its banks, and quantities of water poured from it into said hollows and openings, where already the rains had caused an unusual amount of water to collect, and thence, through fissures and cracks, water passed into defendants’ mine, and so into plaintiff’s mine. If the land had been in its natural condition, the water would have spread over the surface and done no harm. The defendants tendered evidence to show that they had taken every ■reasonable precaution to . guard against ordinary emergencies, and that they had, by diverting and improving the water-course and otherwise, greatly lessened the chance of water escaping from the surface of the land into their own mines, and thence into the plaintiff’s mine; and contended
In the case at bar the defendant, for purposes of its own, wrongfully turned the brook from its natural channel, and let it flow towards plaintiff’s quarry, not knowing what would happen, whereby large and unusual quantities of water were brought to and accumulated in the Marble Company’s abandoned quarries, and it was the duty of the defendants to see that no damage was thereby done; and the fact that it did not know and had no reason to suspect that the plaintiff’s predecessors had worked their quarry out of bounds and thereby weakened the wall between it and the adjacent quarry, makes no difference, unless sufch fact constitutes contributory negligence imputable to the plaintiff.
Now, an act or omission of a party injured, or of those for whose acts and omissions he is responsible, in order to constitute contributory negligence, must have related to something in respect of which he or they owed to the defendant, or to those in whose place he stands, the duty of being careful, and have been negligent, and in the produc
In working their quarry the plaintiff’s predecessors did not know, and could not .possibly anticipate, the then nonexistent circumstances, that years afterwards the defendant would build a new road where it did in 1884, and wrongfully turn the brook into the quarries above, whereby their quarry would be endangered if they weakened the wall by working out of bounds. Their act in this respect was not wrongful as to the defendant, and they owed the defendant no duty concerning it, and therefore negligence is not predicable of it, even though it was wrongful as to the Marble Company, with the rights of which the defendant in no way •connects itself. The state of the wall, legally considered, was not a proximate cause of the injury, but was merely a condition that made the injury possible.
Judgment affirmed.