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and such person sells a ticket over one of the roads, the other company is not responsible for the negligence of the connecting road.' The appointment of a common agent to sell tickets over connecting roads, does not constitute the latter partners in the transportation. A railroad ticket which, together with attached coupons for passage over connecting lines, provides that the company selling it shall not be liable for injuries occurring beyond its own route, limits the liability of such company to its own line.' Through passenger railway tickets in the form of coupons, entitling the holder to pass over successive roads, are regarded as distinct tickets for each road, sold by the first company as agent for the others, as far as the passenger is concerned. The rights and liabilities of the parties are the same as if the tickets had been purchased of each company separately at its own depot or station. The liability of each company in turn continues, in regard to such passenger, from the place and time of receiving the ticket, until they reach the point where the liability of the next one of the connecting lines commences. It is the duty of each company to see its passengers safely over the whole route to the next connecting line, as far as the utmost care will effect the same." A ticket good for a continuous passage over several lines is good for a continuous passage over each line, and not merely over the entire connecting lines.' But one of several lines for the transportation of passengers, running in connection over different portions of a route of travel, may contract as principal for the conveyance of a passenger over the whole route; and such contract may be established by the circumstances, notwithstanding the passenger receives tickets for the different lines, signed by their

'Atchison, T. & S. F. R. Co. v. Cochran, 7 L. R. A. 414, 43 Kan. 225, 41 Am. & Eng. R. Cas. 48.

Hartan v. Eastern R. Co. 114 Mass. 44; Sprague v. Smith, 29 Vt. 421; Straiton v. New York & N. H. R. Co. 2 E. D. Smith, 184. Kerrigan v. Southern Pac. R. Co. 81 Cal. 248, 41 Harris v. Howe, 5 L. R. A. 777. 74 Tex. 534, 498; Bethea v. Northeastern R. Co. 26 S. C. 91; Peterson v. Chicago, R. I. & P. R. Co. 80 Iowa, 92.

Am. & Eng. R. Cas. 28; 39 Am. & Eng. R. Cas.

Young v. Pennsylvania R. Co. 5 Cent. Rep. 851, 115 Pa. 112; 2 Redf. Railways (4th ed.), 276; Knight v. Portland, S. & P. R. Co. 56 Me. 234.

Knight v. Portland, S. & P. R. Co. 56 Me. 234.

Townsend v. New York Cent. & H. R. R. Co. 56 N. Y. 295.

'Auerbach v. New York Cent. & H. R. R. Co. 89 N. Y. 281.

separate agents. Passage tickets are generally to be regarded as tokens rather than contracts, and are not within the rule excluding parol evidence to vary a written agreement.' In the absence of an express contract for through transportation, or circumstances from which it will be implied, the holder of coupon tickets is not bound to pursue his journey without intermission when it has been once begun, as in the case of a passenger whose trip is confined to the route of a single carrier, but may, at the end of each of its stages represented by such tickets, temporarily discontinue his passage without losing his right to resume it within a reasonable time."

'Quimby v. Vanderbilt, 17 N. Y. 306. See also Williams v. Vanderbilt, 28

N. Y. 217.

Brooke v. Grand Trunk R. Co. 15 Mich. 332.

CHAPTER XXVI.

SUNDAY TRAFFIC AND TRAFFIC OVER OTHER ROADS.

§ 149. Traveling on Sunday.

§ 150. Operating Over Line of Another Carrier.

§ 151. Liability of Lessee of Railroad.

§ 152. Joint Use of Road by Carriers.

§ 149. Traveling on Sunday.

While the courts of last resort in the United States which have had the subject under consideration, except in the one or two where the doctrine of comparative negligence is still occasionally applied to meet "hard cases," agree in the legal proposition that any culpable negligence or any illegal act on the part of the plaintiff which essentially contributes to his injury will prevent a recovery, yet there is a marked difference in opinion as to what constitutes a contributory cause of injury. This difference, however, is mostly confined to cases in which the defense is interposed of the plaintiff's violation of the Sunday law. For instance, the courts of Massachusetts, Maine and Vermont have held in numerous cases, that a person traveling on Sunday, not from necessity or charity, cannot recover of a town or city for injuries caused by a defective highway or even by the carelessness of another traveler.' But in reaching such a result, the courts of Massachusetts have uniformly assumed that the plaintiff's unlawful act contributed to his injury; while on the other hand the Supreme Court of the United States and the courts of New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Rhode Island, Arkansas, Minnesota, and of some other states following the same rule, have reached the opposite result, and have held that the plaintiff in such cases 'Stanton v. Metropolitan R. Co. 14 Allen, 485; Bosworth v. Swansey, 10 Met. 363; Jones v. Andover, 10 Allen, 18; Feital v. Middlesex R. Co. 109 Mass. 398; Smith v. Boston & M. R. Co. 120 Mass. 490; Cratty v. Bangor, 57 Me. 423; Lyons v. Desotelle, 124 Mass. 387; Bucher v. Fitchburg R. Co. 131 Mass. 156; Read v. Boston & A. R. Co. 140 Mass. 199; Johnson v. Irasburgh, 47 Vt. 28, 19 Am. Rep. 111; Parker v. Latner, 60 Me. 528.

may recover, always giving as among the controlling reasons that the illegal act did not contribute to the injury.'

There must of course be a fallacy somewhere in the reasoning that can reach opposite results while proceeding upon the same premises. The fallacy in the reasoning of those who support the Massachusetts rule, recognized as a local law to be enforced in the United States courts, but since changed by statute, consists in assuming (unconsciously no doubt), that a mere concurrence of the illegal act with the accident in point of time is to be treated as a concurring cause of the injury, which it is not, but rather a condition or incident merely. In all other cases than these affected by the Sunday law the courts of Massachusetts have discriminated and applied the principle of contributory fault in strict accordance with the distinction suggested; for instance, in Welch v. Wesson, 6 Gray, 505, where two persons were racing contrary to law, and one of them negligently injured the other, it was held the injured party could recover, because his own illegal act did not contribute to his injury. So where the plaintiff's team was standing in a street in a manner prohibited by statute, and was carelessly run into by the defendant, a recovery was sustained upon the same ground. And in Gregg v. Wyman, 4 Cush. 322, it was decided there was error in holding a plaintiff's illegal conduct to be an essential element of his case, when in fact it was merely incidental to it.

The fallacy of the reasoning in support of the Massachusetts rule in cases affected by the Sunday law has been most ably exposed by the courts of Connecticut, Wisconsin, Maine, Rhode Island, Vermont and New York while at the same time, they strongly support the proposition of law that an illegal act, if it 'Platz v. Cohoes, 89 N. Y. 219; Broschart v. Tuttle, 11 L. R. A. 33, 59 Conn. 1; Louisville, N. A. & C. R. Co. v. Buck, 2 L. R. A. 520, 116 Ind. 566; Powhatan S. B. Co. v. Appomattox _R_ Co. 65 U. S. 24 How. 247, 16 L. ed. 682; Baldwin v. Barney, 12 R. I. 392; Harrison v. Marshall, 4 E. D. Smith, 271; Bertholf v. O'Reilly, 8 Hun, 16, aff'd 74 N. Y. 509, 30 Am. Rep. 323; Nodine v. Doherty, 46 Barb. 59; Carroll v. Staten Island R. Co. 58 N. Y. 126; Stewart v. Davis, 31 Ark. 518, 25 Am. Rep. 576; Mohney v Cook, 26 Pa. 342; Com. v. Louisville & N. R. Co. 80 Ky. 291; Kerwhacker v. Cleveland, C. & C. R. Co. 3 Ohio St. 172; Opsahl v. Judd, 30 Minn. 126; Jacobus v. St. Paul & C. R. Co. 20 Minn. 130; Sharp v. Evergreen Trop. 11 West. Rep. 549, 67 Mich. 443; Norris v. Litchfield, 35 N. H. 271. Bucher v. Cheshire R. Co. 125 U. S. 555, 31 L. ed. 795.

Steele v. Burkhardt, 104 Mass. 59.

directly contributed to the injury, is a bar to a recovery as matter of law. In Sutton v. Wauwatosa, 29 Wis. 21, the plaintiff was driving his cattle to market on Sunday in violation of the statute, when they were injured by the breaking down of a defective bridge, which the defendant town was bound to maintain. The defense was the plaintiff's own illegal act. Dixon, Ch. J., in delivering the opinion of the court, said: "To make good the defense it must appear that a relation existed between the act or violation of law on the part of the plaintiff, and the injury or accident of which he complains, and that relation must have been such as to have caused, or helped to cause, the injury or accident, not in any remote or speculative sense, but in the natural and ordinary course of events, as one event is known to precede or follow another." It is then shown that a violation of the Sunday law is not of itself an act, omission or fault of this kind with reference to a defective bridge, over which a traveler may be passing, unlawfully though it may be, because the violation of such a law has no tendency to cause it. All other conditions remaining the same, the same accident would have happened on any other day, or if the traveler was at the time on an errand of necessity or mercy.

The case of Baker v. Portland, 58 Me. 199, did not arise under the Sunday law, but the plaintiff was injured by a defect in the highway while driving at a rate of speed prohibited by the village ordinance, and the judgment in favor of the plaintiff was sustained expressly upon the ground that the jury had found that the fast driving did not contribute to the injury. Barrows, J., in delivering the opinion of the court said: "The defendant has cited a strong line of cases showing that when the plaintiff was violating a city ordinance he could not recover. But in all the latter class of cases it will be seen upon examination that the wrongful act of the plaintiffs either was, or was assumed to be, in some manner or degree contributory to the producing of the injury complained of. . . . Undoubtedly there are many cases where the contemporaneous violation of the law by the plaintiff is so connected with his claim for damages as to preclude his recovery. . But the fact that a party plaintiff was at the time of the injury passing another wayfarer on the wrong side of the street, or without giving him half the road, or that he

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