504 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. subordination to the use of the highways for travel by the public. This principle, as stated in the important case of Hudson River Telephone Co. v. Watervliet Turnpike & Railway Co./ is as follows : — "The primary and dominant purpose of a street is for public passage, and any appropriation of it by legislative sanction to other objects must be deemed to be in subordination to this use unless a contrary intent is clearly expressed. The inconvenience and loss which others may suffer from the adoption of a form of locomotion authorized by law, which is carefully and skilfully employed, and which does not destroy or impair the usefulness of the street as a public way, is not sufficient cause for a recovery, unless there is some statute which makes it actionable." The same principle is well expressed in the Ohio case : — "The dominant purpose for which streets in a municipality are dedi- cated and opened is to facilitate public travel and transportation, and in that view new and improved modes of conveyance by street railways are by law authorized to be constructed, and a franchise granted to a tele- phone company of constructing and operating its lines along and upon such streets is subordinate to the rights of the public in the streets for the purpose of travel and transportation." ^ This leading principle, that the streets are primarily for public travel, is an extremely important one, and it must be regarded as very fortunate that the courts have protected it so thoroughly in these cases. The same principle has also been well asserted in another direction, when the courts have pronounced that the right of public travel along the highways is paramount even to the crossing of the highways by steam railroads. Of course, for reasons of public advantage, steam railroads are by statute ex- pressly given the right to lay their tracks across the highways, and from the necessity of the case steam trains have the right of way at such crossing, as against travel on the highway ; but with these exceptions the paramount right of the public to travel over the highways remains, and therefore, when the question arises as to the right of an electric railway to lay its tracks across the steam railroad tracks on the highways, in the absence of express statutory restrictions, the electric railway may cross with its tracks, and its 1 13s N. Y. 393. 2 Cincinnati Inclined Plane Railway Co. v. City & Suburban Telegraph Associa- tion, 48 Oh. St. 390.
