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ation of the first principle, the defendant cannot exonerate himself or claim immunity from the consequences of his own tortious act, voluntarily or negligently done to the injury of the plaintiff, on the ground that the plaintiff has been guilty of some other and independent wrong or violation of law. Wrongs or offences cannot be set off against each other in this way. "But we should work a confusion of relations, and lend a very doubtful assistance to morality," say the court in Mohney v. Cook, "if we should allow one offender against the law to the injury of another to set off against the plaintiff that he too is a public offender." Himself guilty of a wrong, not dependent on nor caused by that charged against the plaintiff, but arising from his own voluntary act or his neglect, the defendant cannot assume the championship of public rights, nor to prosecute the plaintiff as an offender against the laws of the State, and thus to impose upon him a penalty many times greater than what those laws prescribe. Neither justice nor sound morals require this; and it seems contrary to the dictates of both that such a defence should be allowed to prevail. It would extend the maxim, ex turpe causa non oritur actio, beyond the scope of its legitimate application, and violate the maxim equally binding and wholesome, and more extensive in its operation, that no man shall be permitted to take advantage of his own wrong. To take advantage of his own wrong, and to visit unmerited and over rigorous punishment upon the plaintiff, constitute the sole motive for such defence on the part of the person making it. In the cases of the horses let to be driven on Sunday, so far as the owners were obliged to resort to an action on the contract which was executory and illegal, of course there could be no recovery; but to an action of tort, founded not on the contract, but on the tort or wrong subsequently committed by the defendant, the illegality of the contract furnished no defence, as is clearly demonstrated in Woodman v. Hubbard, and the cases there cited. The decisions under the provision of the constitution of this State abolishing imprisonment for debt arising out of or founded on a contract, express or implied, and some others in this court, strongly illustrate the same distinction. In re Mowry, 12 Wis. 52, 56, 57; Cotton v. Sharpstein, 14 Wis. 229, 230; Schennert v. Koehler, 23 Wis. 523, 527.

And as to the other principle that the act or conduct of the plaintiff, which can be imputed to him as a fault, want of due care,

or negligence on his part contributing to the injury, must have some connection with the injury as cause to effect, this also seems almost too clear to require thought or elaboration. To make good the defence on this ground, 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 complained; and that relation must have been such as to have caused or helped to cause the injury or accident, not in a remote or speculative sense, but in the natural and ordinary course of events, as one event is known to precede or follow another. It must have been some act, omission, or fault naturally and ordinarily calculated to produce the injury, or from which the injury or accident might naturally and reasonably have been anticipated under the circumstances. It is obvious that a violation of the Sunday law is not of itself an act, omission, or fault of this kind, with reference to a defect in the highway or in a bridge over which a traveller may be passing, unlawfully though it may be. The fact that the traveller may be violating this law of the State has no natural or necessary tendency to cause the injury which may happen to him from the defect. All other conditions and circumstances remaining the same, the same accident or injury would have happened on any other day as well. The same natural causes would have produced the same result on any other day; and the time of the accident or injury, as that it was on Sunday, is wholly immaterial so far as the cause of it or the question of contributory negligence is concerned. In this respect it would be wholly immaterial also that the traveller was within the exceptions of the statute, and travelling on an errand of necessity or charity, and so was lawfully upon the highway.

The mere matter of time when an injury like this takes place is not in general an element which does or can enter at all into the consideration of the cause of it. Time and place are circumstances necessary in order that any event may happen or transpire ; but they are not ordinarily, if they ever are, circumstances of cause in transactions of this nature. There may be concurrence or connection of time and place between two or three or more events, and yet one event not have the remotest influence in causing or producing either of the others. A traveller on the highway, contrary to the provisions of the statute, yet peaceably and quietly pursuing his course, might be assaulted and robbed by a highwayman. It would be difficult in such case to perceive how the high

wayman could connect the unlawful act of the traveller with his assault and robbery so as to justify or excuse them, or how it could be said that the former had any natural or legitimate tendency to cause or produce the latter. It is true, it might be said if the traveller had not been present at that particular time or place, he would not have been assaulted and robbed, but that too might be said of any other assault or robbery committed upon him; for if his presence at one time and place be a fault or wrong on his part, contributing to the assault and robbery in the nature of cause to effect, it must be equally so at every other time and place, and so always a defence in the mouth of a highwayman. Every highwayman must have his opportunity by the passing of some traveller; and so some one must pass over a rotten and unsafe bridge or defective highway before any accident or injury can happen from that cause. Connection, therefore, merely in point of time, between the unlawful act or fault of the plaintiff and the wrong or omission of the defendant, the same being in other respects disconnected, and independent acts or events, does not suffice to establish contributory negligence or to defeat the plaintiff's action on that ground. As observed in Mohney v. Cook, such connection, if looked upon as in any sense a cause, whether sacred and mysterious or otherwise, clearly falls under the rule causa proxima non remota spectatur.

"The cause of an event," says Appleton, C. J., in Moulton v. Sanford, 51 Maine, 134, "is the sum total of the contingencies of every description, which, being realized, the event invariably follows. It is rare, if ever, that the invariable sequence of events subsists between one antecedent and one consequent. Ordinarily that condition is usually termed the cause, whose share in the matter is the most conspicuous and is the most immediately preceding and proximate to the event." In the present case the weight of the same cattle, upon the same bridge, either the day before or the day after the event complained of, when the plaintiff would have been guilty of no violation of law in driving them, would most unquestionably have produced the same injurious result. And if, on that day even, the driving had been a work of necessity or charity, as if the city of Milwaukee had been in great part destroyed by fire, as Chicago recently was, and great numbers of her inhabitants in a condition of helplessness and starvation, and the plaintiff hurrying up his drove of beef cattle for their relief, no one doubts the same acci

dent would then have happened, and the same injuries have ensued. The law of gravitation would not then have been suspended, nor would the rotten and defective stringers have refused to give way under the superincumbent weight, precisely as they did do on the present occasion. There are many other violations of law which the traveller or other person passing along the highway may, at the time he receives an injury from a defect in it, be in the act of committing, and which are quite as closely connected with the injury, or the cause of it, as is the violation of which complaint is made against the present plaintiff. He may be engaged in cruelly beating or torturing his horse, or ox, or other animal; he may be in the pursuit of game, with intent to kill or destroy it, at a season of the year when this is prohibited; he may be exposing game for sale, or have it in his possession, when these are unlawful; he may be in the act of committing an assault or resisting an officer; he may be fraudulently passing a toll-gate, without paying his toll; and he may be unlawfully setting or using a net or seine, for the purpose of catching fish, in an inland lake or stream. All of these are acts prohibited by the same chapter or statute in which we find the prohibition from work and labor on Sunday, and some of them under the same, but most under a greater penalty than is prescribed for that offence, thus showing the character or degree of culpability which was variously attached to them in the opinion of the legislature. And there are many other minor offences, mala prohibita merely, created by statute, which might be in like manner committed. There are in Massachusetts, and doubtless in many of the States, statutes against blasphemy and profane cursing and swearing, the prevention of which seems to be equally if not more an object of solicitude and care on the part of the legislature than the prevention of labor, travel, or other secular pursuits on Sunday, because more severely punished. It has not yet transpired, we believe, even in Massachusetts, that the action of any person to recover damages for an injury sustained by reason of defects in a highway has been peremptorily dismissed because he was engaged at the time in profane cursing or swearing, or because he was in a state of voluntary intoxication, likewise prohibited under penalty by statute.

It is obvious that the breaking down of a bridge from the rottenness of the timbers, or their inability to sustain the weight of the person or of his horses and carriage, could not be effected by

either of these circumstances; and yet, on the principle of the decisions above referred to in that State, it is not easy to see why the action must not be dismissed. On principle there could be

no discrimination between the cases, and it could make no difference in what the unlawful act of the plaintiff consisted at the time of receiving the injury. We must reject the doctrine of those cases entirely, and adopt that of the other cases cited, and which is well expressed by the Supreme Court of Maine, in Baker v. Portland, 59 Maine, 199, 204, as follows: "The defendant's counsel contends that the simple fact that the plaintiff is in the act of violating the law at the time of the injury is a bar to the right of recovery. 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 to lay down such a rule as the counsel claims, and disregard the distinction in the ruling of which he complains, would be productive oftentimes of palpable injustice. The fact that a party plaintiff in an action of this description 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 was travelling on runners without bells, in contravention of the statute, or that he was smoking a cigar in the street, in violation of municipal ordinance, while it might subject the offender to a penalty, will not excuse the town for a neglect to make its ways safe and convenient for travellers, if the commission of the plaintiff's offence did not in any degree contribute to produce the injury of which he complains."

Strong analogy is afforded, and much weight and force of reason bearing upon this question are found, in some of the cases which have arisen upon life policies, and as to the meaning and effect to be given to the condition usually contained in them, exempting the company from liability in case the assured "shall die in the known violation of any law," &c., and it has been held that the violation must be such as is calculated to endanger life, by leading to acts of violence against, or to the bodily or personal injury or exposure of, the assured, and so to operate in producing his death in the connection of cause to effect. See opinions in Bradley v. Mutual Benefit Life Ins. Co., 44 N. Y.

In the case of Clemens v. Clemens, recently decided by this court, it became necessary to consider the same question, though

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