260 • HARVARD LAW REVIEW. criterion. A steam railroad comes into serious conflict with the usual modes of travel, whereas an ordinary street railway, instead of adding a new servitude, operates in furtherance of the original uses of the street. The danger from the electric current, or from the frightening of horses, does not appear to be sufficient to create a new servitude. In answer to the suggestion that telegraph and telephone poles and wires have been held to constitute a new servitude, the court said that these are not used to facilitate the use of the street for travel and transportation, or if so, very indirectly so, " whereas the poles and wires now in question are directly ancillary to the uses of the street as such, in that they communicate the power by which the street cars are propelled ; " and the Chief Justice alluded to the significant fact that telegraph lines erected by a railroad company within its right of way to increase the safety and efficiency of the railroad were held not to be a new burden, but only a legitimate development of the easement already acquired. The injunction'was refused. After this came several more decisions of inferior courts. There is an amusing one by Judge Reilly, of the Circuit Court of Wayne County, Michigan, who narrates his personal experi- ence in driving his own horse and meeting an electric car in that very street the week before, and yet decides that the danger is not serious, and that there is no change in the mode of occupation of the street and no new servitude imposed.^ The subject was dis- cussed in all its aspects in a long opinion by Toney, J., of the Louisville Law and Equity Court, on June 30, 1890.^ The court cited the late cases above referred to and quoted Cicero, but especially the opinion of the Supreme Court of Rhode Island, and decided that an injunction should not have been granted at the suit of the owner of a factory on the line of the street. In Lonergan v. Lafayette Street Railway Co., decided by the Circuit Court at Lafayette, Indiana, July 9, 1890, it appeared that the statute under which the defendant company was organized provided for the incorporation of any •* street or horse railroad company for the purpose of constructing street or horse railroads* through the streets of the cities and towns " of Indiana. The act was entitled *• An Act to provide for the incorporation of street 1 Detroit City R'y Co. v. Mills, Circuit Court, Wayne Co., Mich , 1890. 2 Louisville Bagging Manufacturing Co. v. The Central Passenger Railway Co.
