103 Ga. 847 | Ga. | 1898
T. J. Dykes, plaintiff below, sued the Mayor and Council of the City of Macon and the Macon Consolidated Street Railway Company for personal injuries. The undisputed facts proved at the trial were, that plaintiff, while driving a horse attached to a two-wheeled road-cart, along a street in Macon upon which the railroad company had a track, attempted to drive, while the horse was in a walk, across such track at an angle of about forty-five degrees. When the wheels of his cart came in contact with the iron rails of the track, the wheels •slipped along the rails and made a scraping noise. The horse immediately began to kick, jump and run, and became wholly unmanageable. He ran at full speed along the street for some •one hundred and fifty feet, when the cart collided with a wagon, and plaintiff was violently thrown to the ground and seriously injured. The height of the rails of the track above the surface of the street was variously estimated by the witnesses to be from two to four inches. An ordinance of the city made it unlawful for any street-railroad company to construct or place any track in the streets of the city, the rails of which should be above the level of the street. Plaintiff testified, in reference to his horse: “After driving him nearly a year, I thought [he] was a reliable horse. I had driven him almost every day to the cart and buggy, and ploughed him some. . . I have seen him under conditions in which horses disposed to kick would kick, and he never attempted to do so. He has made several attempts to run away, but was easily controlled, very
Assuming that the defendants were guilty of negligence, the controlling question in the case is:' Was their negligence the proximate cause of plaintiff’s injuries? There seems to be no absolutely consistent rule to guide us in determining the matter, and each case has been made by the courts to largely depend upon its own facts. The most generally accepted theory of causation, however, is thatof natural and probable consequences. 1 Jaggard on Torts, 74, and cases cited; Gilson v. Delaware Canal Co., 36 Am. St. Rep. 802, and cases cited on p. 809. The rule is, that, in order to recover for an injury alleged to have resulted from the negligence of another, the injury must be the natural and probable consequence of .the negligence; or, as otherwise stated, the wrong and the resulting .damage must be known by common experience to be naturally and usually in sequence. The damage, according to the usual course of events, must fol-low from the wrong. Gerhard v. Bates, 2 El. & Bl. 490; Addison on Torts, § 6; Cooley on Torts, 69. The principle in this State seems to be substantially the same. If damages are •traceable to an act of negligence, but are not its legal or material consequence, or if other and contingent circumstances preponderate largely in causing the injurious effect, such damages are too remote and contingent to be the basis of a recovery.
After a very careful consideration of the law and the controlling undisputed facts in the case at bar, a majority of us are of the opinion that the negligence of the defendants was
Judgment reversed.