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tion to build the wagon faithfully arises solely out of his contract with B. The public have nothing to do with it. Misfortune to third persons, not parties to the contract, would not be a natural and necessary consequence of the builder's negligence; and such negligence is not an act imminently dangerous to human life.

So, for the same reason, if a horse be defectively shod by a smith, and a person hiring the horse from the owner is thrown and injured in consequence of the smith's negligence in shoeing, the smith is not liable for the injury. The smith's duty in such case grows exclusively out of his contract with the owner of the horse; it was a duty which the smith owed to him alone, and to no one else. And although the injury to the rider may have happened in consequence of the negligence of the smith, the latter was not bound, either by his contract or by any considerations of public policy or safety, to respond for his breach of duty to any one except the person he contracted with.

This was the ground on which the case of Winterbottom v. Wright, 10 Mees. & Welsb. 109, was decided. A. contracted with the postmaster-general to provide a coach to convey the mail-bags along a certain line of road, and B. and others also contracted to horse the coach along the same line. B. and his co-contractors hired C., who was the plaintiff, to drive the coach. The coach, in consequence of some latent defect, broke down; the plaintiff was thrown from his seat and lamed. It was held that C. could not maintain an action against A. for the injury thus sustained. The reason of the decision is best stated by Baron Rolfe. A.'s duty to keep the coach in good condition was a duty to the postmaster-general, with whom he made his contract, and not a duty to the driver employed by the owners of the horses.

But the case in hand stands on a different ground. The defendant was a dealer in poisonous drugs. Gilbert was his agent in preparing them for market. The death or great bodily harm of some person was the natural and almost inevitable consequence of the sale of belladonna by means of the false label.

Gilbert, the defendant's agent, would have been punishable for manslaughter if Mrs. Thomas had died in consequence of taking the falsely labelled medicine. Every man who, by his culpable negligence, causes the death of another, although without intent. to kill, is guilty of manslaughter. 2 R. S. 662, § 19. A chemist

who negligently sells laudanum in a phial labelled as paregoric, and thereby causes the death of a person to whom it is administered, is guilty of manslaughter. Terrymond's Case, 1 Lewin's Crown Cases, 169. "So highly does the law value human life, that it admits of no justification wherever life has been lost and the carelessness or negligence of one person has contributed to the death of another. Regina v. Swindall, 2 Car. & Kir. 232, 233. And this rule applies not only where the death of one is occasioned by the negligent act of another, but where it is caused by the negligent omission of a duty of that other. 2 Car. & Kir. 368, 371. Although the defendant Winchester may not be answerable criminally for the negligence of his agent, there can be no doubt of his liability in a civil action, in which the act of the agent is to be regarded as the act of the principal.

In respect to the wrongful and criminal character of the negligence complained of, this case differs widely from those put by the defendant's counsel. No such imminent danger existed in those cases. In the present case the sale of the poisonous article was made to a dealer in drugs, and not to a consumer. The injury, therefore, was not likely to fall on him, or on his vendee, who was also a dealer, but much more likely to be visited on a remote purchaser, as actually happened. The defendant's negligence put human life in imminent danger. Can it be said that there was no duty on the part of the defendant to avoid the creation of that danger by the exercise of greater caution? or that the exercise of that caution was a duty only to his immediate vendee, whose life was not endangered? The defendant's duty arose out of the nature of his business, and the danger to others incident to its mismanagement. Nothing but mischief like that which actually happened could have been expected from sending the poison falsely labelled into the market; and the defendant is justly responsible for the probable consequences of the act. The duty of exercising caution in this respect did not arise out of the defendant's contract of sale to Aspinwall. The wrong done by the defendant was in putting the poison, mislabelled, into the hands of Aspinwall as an article of merchandise to be sold and afterwards used as the extract of dandelion, by some person then unknown. The owner of a horse and cart, who leaves them unattended in the street, is liable for any damage which may result from his negligence. Lynch v. Nurdin, 1 Ad. & Ellis, N. s. 29;

Illidge v. Goodwin, 5 Car. & Payne, 190. The owner of a loaded gun who puts it into the hands of a child, by whose indiscretion it is discharged, is liable for the damage occasioned by the discharge. 5 Maule & Sel. 198. The defendant's contract of sale to Aspinwall does not excuse the wrong done to the plaintiffs. It was a part of the means by which the wrong was effected. The plaintiffs' injury and their remedy would have stood on the same principle, if the defendant had given the belladonna to Dr. Foord without price, or if he had put it in his shop without his knowledge, under circumstances which would probably have led to its sale on the faith of the label.

In Longmeid v. Holliday, 6 L. & Eq. 562, the distinction is recognized between an act of negligence imminently dangerous to the lives of others and one that is not so. In the former case, the party guilty of the negligence is liable to the party injured, whether there be a contract between them or not; in the latter, the negligent party is liable only to the party with whom he contracted, and on the ground that negligence is a breach of the contract.

The defendant, on the trial, insisted that Aspinwall and Foord were guilty of negligence in selling the article in question for what it was represented to be in the label; and that the suit, if it could be sustained at all, should have been brought against Foord. The judge charged the jury that if they, or either of them, were guilty of negligence in selling the belladonna for dandelion, the verdict must be for the defendant; and left the question of their negligence to the jury, who found on that point for the plaintiff. If the case really depended on the point thus raised, the question was properly left to the jury. But I think it did not. The defendant, by affixing the label to the jar, represented its contents to be dandelion, and to have been "prepared" by his agent, Gilbert. The word "prepared" on the label must be understood to mean that the article was manufactured by him, or that it had passed through some process under his hands which would give him personal knowledge of its true name and quality. Whether Foord was justified in selling the article upon the faith of the defendant's label, would have been an open question in an action by the plaintiffs against him; and I wish to be understood as giving no opinion on that point. But it seems to me to be clear that the defendant cannot, in this case, set up as a defence,

that Foord sold the contents of the jar as and for what the defendant represented it to be. The label conveyed the idea distinctly to Foord that the contents of the jar was the extract of dandelion, and that the defendant knew it to be such. So far as the defendant is concerned, Foord was under no obligation to test the truth of the representation. The charge of the judge, in submitting to the jury the question in relation to the negligence of Foord and Aspinwall, cannot be complained of by the defendant.

GARDINER, J., concurred in affirming the judgment, on the ground that selling the belladonna without a label indicating that it was poison, was declared a misdemeanor by statute (2 R. S. 694, § 23), but expressed no opinion upon the question whether, independent of the statute, the defendant would have been liable to these plaintiffs. Judgment affirmed.

Causation.There is no difficulty with those cases in which the chain of causation runs back through a series of (albeit human) machines. The law permits, or rather requires, that the chain should be traced back to him who set in motion the dangerous element. This has been settled ever since Scott v. Shepherd, 3 Wils. 403, was decided. This was the case of the lighted squib thrown by the defendant into the market-house on fair-day, which A., B., and C. had caught up convulsively, as it were, from their booths and thrown out, until at last it struck the plaintiff in the eye. The question at issue was whether trespass or case was the proper form of action; but no doubt was entertained, even by the dissenting judge (Mr. Justice Blackstone), that case was maintainable against the defendant. The language of Chief Justice De Grey is often cited. The throwing the squib by the defendant," said he, "was an unlawful act at common law; the squib had a natural power and tendency to do mischief indiscriminately, but what mischief, or where it would fall, none

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could know. The fault egreditur e persona of him who threw the squib. It would naturally produce a defence to be made by every person in danger of being hurt thereby; and no line can be drawn as to the mischief likely to happen to any person in such danger. The two persons, Willis and Ryall, did not act with, or in combination with, the defendant, and their removal of the squib for fear of danger to themselves seems to me to be a continuation of the first act of the defendant until the explosion of the squib. No man contracts guilt in defending himself; the second and third man were not guilty of any trespass, but all the injury was done by the first act of the defendant. . . . I conceive all the facts of throwing the squib must be considered as one single act; namely, the act of the defendant; the same as if it had been a cracker made with gunpowder which had bounded and rebounded again and again before it had struck out the plaintiff's eye." It follows, of course, that none of the intermediate persons could be liable.

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In Vandenburgh v. Truax, 4 Denio, 464, the plaintiff sued the defendant for the loss of a quantity of wine. It appeared that the defendant, having a quarrel with a boy in the street, chased him with a pickaxe into the plaintiff's store; and the boy, in endeavoring to keep out of the reach of his pursuer, ran against and knocked out the fawcett from a cask of wine, by means of which the loss complained of occurred. It was held that the plaintiff could re

cover.

So, in McDonald v. Snelling, 14 Allen, 290, where by the defendant's negligence his horse ran into another's sleigh and frightened the horses, causing them to run into the plaintiff's sleigh, it was held that the defendant was liable. "It is clear from numerous authorities," said the court, "that the mere circumstance that there have intervened between the wrongful cause and the injurious consequence acts produced by the volition of animals or of human beings does not necessarily make the result so remote that no action can be maintained."

The plaintiff himself may have become paralyzed with fright or fear, or have been caused to make a sudden and, as it were, involuntary start, which threw him against the calamitous agent; but, if this was merely the effect of the action of the defendant, the connection between the damage which ensued and the defendant, who caused the fright

or start, remains unbroken. Thus, in Coulter v. American Express Co., 6 Lans. 67, the plaintiff brought an action for damages sustained by jumping against the wall of a building. The evidence was that she was alarmed by the driving of the driver in charge of the defendant's express wagon, which he had driven upon the sidewalk behind and near her, and sprang suddenly aside and was injured by striking her face against the wall of the building. She was allowed to recover damages, on the ground that she had not been guilty of negligence. The action of the driver was therefore the cause of the injury. The case was reversed in the Court of Appeals, but not upon this point. 56 N. Y. 585. We have here the key to the doctrine of contributory negligence; but that subject remains to be presented hereafter.

See further, as to intervening agencies of the kind represented by Scott v. Shepherd, Guille v. Swan, 19 Johns. 381; Fairbanks v. Kerr, 70 Penn. St. 86; Wharton, Negligence, §§ 93, 94.

The principal case, Thomas v. Winchester, is two steps removed from Scott v. Shepherd. 1. The intermediate persons between the plaintiff and defendant were not machines, but acted freely and deliberately, on their own account, in disposing of the poison. 2. The plaintiff had to bring his action through the midst of contracting parties. We propose to consider each of these facts at some length.

It is true that in Thomas v. Winchester the poison passed through the hands of several persons, acting freely, as principals, and without excitement or hurry; but that is not enough to break the connection between the plaintiff and the defendant. Had negligence been found against Mr. Aspinwall, the

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