OVERHEAD WIRES.
TWO decisions have lately been given, one by Mr. Justice Stephen, the other by the Railway Commissioners, upon a question which is yearly growing in importance. The ex- tension of the telegraph and its younger sister the telephone has introduced a new danger to street traffic. Tiles, chimney- pots, and even chimneys, ladders, and scaffolding, have long been in the habit of falling upon the passer-by. Every high wind brings its list of casualties, and we have pretty well come to regard them as a part of the order of nature equally with the wind itself. But the dangers arising from this source
stand to those associated with overhead wires in something of the relation which assaults with the fist hold to assaults with the knife. Whether a man is stabbed or beaten may make little difference. Either way he may be within an inch of losing his life ; and when the results are identical, the sufferer is not inclined to lay much stress upon differ- ences of method. But Judges and juries make a great deal of difference. To use the knife is " un-English," and as such it gets no mercy either in the verdict or the sentence. So far as an accident can be " un-English," the term may be applied to the fall of an overhead wire. To be beheaded by a wire that cuts with more certainty than an executioner's axe seems far more terrible than to be crushed under a mass of falling bricks. When once the mind has become alive to what is possibly in store for us, it is impossible to look up to the network of intersecting wires by which all the principal streets are canopied without some apprehension. There may be no immediate prospect of their coming down, but they have no immunity against decay ; and if they are allowed to decay, they must come down. Even when they are first erected, they are only maintained in their places by their supports ; and as these are usually chimneys, the new danger borrows some of its terrors from the old. The fall of a chimney no longer concerns those only who may be passing just under it ; it threatens every one who is within reach of the connecting wires which the chimney helps to keep in place. If the risk itself did not increase we should probably grow accustomed to it. But, if nothing is done to prevent it, it cer- tainly will increase. These wires have for the most part been put up within the last few years, and as yet., therefore, the majority of them are in good repair.. By-and-bye they will become rotten from constant exposure, and will have to be replaced. What if the need of replacing them is not discovered in time, or not acted on the moment it is dis- covered? In either case a quick succession of serious and per- haps fatal accidents may be the first intimation that the danger has become acute. A wire which in falling may become a guillotine can never be a pleasing feature of street life. The two decisions just mentioned—supposing Mr. Justice Stephen's to be confirmed on appeal—introduce a broad dis- tinction between wires, according as they are put up by the Post Office or by private companies. In the former case the law provides a process of arbitration. The Postmaster-General has a right to carry wires over the streets if the local authorities do not object. If they do object, the facts are laid before the police magistrate of the district, from whose decision an appeal lies, at the pleasure of either party, to the Railway Commissioners. In the case decided by the Railway Commissioners on Tuesday week, the Wandsworth District Board of Works was the appellant. The Post Office authorities, at the request of the Metropolitan Board of Works, have undertaken to connect the fire-brigade stations in the district with call-points in each parish, so that whenever a fire breaks out the engines can be at once summoned by an electric signal. For this purpose about twenty miles of wire will be needed ; and nearly the whole of this amount, according to the plan of the Post Office engineers, is to be carried overhead. The District Board contend that as overhead wires are necessarily dangerous, underground wires should be used in all future arrangements of this kind. The answer of the Post Office authorities is that as regards this particular arrangement, it must be made in the way they propose, or not at all. To lay wires underground would cost about thirty times as much as to carry them overhead ; and though the Post Office is willing to incur the lesser outlay, in consideration of the security against fire it will entail, it is not willing to incur the greater. The decision of the Railway Commissioners, confirming that of the Police Magistrate, is for the District Board upon the law and for the Post Office upon the facts. The Commissioners admit that overhead wires ought not to be set up except under conditions that will make them harmless to the public. But in the Wandsworth district they think that these conditions are per- fectly attainable. In many sections of the proposed line of wires the streets are little more than country roads, and there is consequently no appreciable risk in carrying wires over them. If the difference of cost were trifling, the Commissioners would probably not have disregarded the objections of the District Board. But where the difference is so very large they are obliged to consider whether these objections are reasonable ; and they have come to the conclusion that they are not. Where the wires are owned by a private company, the law, if Mr. Justice Stephen is right, gives the local authority very much larger powers. Here also the ques- tion has been raised by the Wandsworth District Board. The wire objected to is a private wire, set up by the United Telephone Company to connect two places of business in Putney belonging to the same person. There is no Act of Parliament regulating a transaction of this kind ; and the point that had to be decided was whether the District Board had such a property in a street as to give them the same right of objecting to a wire being stretched across it as a private person would have to object to a wire being stretched across his garden. Mr. Justice Stephen holds that for certain purposes the Board have such a property. The case seems to him to be on all-fours with one in which it was decided that the local authority owned not merely the surface of a street, but so much of the soil underneath it as may be necessary for carrying out alterations or improvements. This decision limits and defines the extent of a street downwards; but Mr. Justice Stephen holds that it does this upon grounds which apply equally in the opposite direction. The use of a street may be affected by what goes on in the air above, as much as by- what goes on in the earth beneath ; consequently, the authorities in whom the property in the street is vested' have the same right to the control and management of the air that they have to the control and management of the ground. Where the Post Office is concerned, this right is qualified by special Acts of Parliament ; where private companies are concerned, there are no special statutes to appeal to, and the general law remains in force.
On the whole, the state of things disclosed by these two- judgments seems a fairly convenient one. The law prevents the reckless multiplication of overhead wires in two ways. Where a private company proposes to put them up, an abso- lute power of prohibiting them is vested in the local authority.. Where the Post Office proposes to put them up, the local' duthority has a power, not of prohibiting, but of objecting ; and though it is not very obvious why the decision whether the objection is valid should be vested in the Railway Com- missioners, there is no reason to quarrel with them as arbitrators. The merit of the law, as thus defined,. is that the public are not left to the mercy of priv ate- companies, about whose competence and solvency nothing may be certainly known. If such a company sets up overhead wires, it is the fault of the local authority, which might have prevented it and did not. On the other hand, where the Post Office is concerned, we are sure that the work will be well done, and once done will be kept in proper repair. Even then, however, it is necessary that some check should be maintained upon the growth of what may easily become a nuisance ; and the arbitration, first of the Police Magistrate, and then, on appeal, of the Railway Commissioners, seems to supply the check that is wanted. If it should turn out that Mr. Justice Stephen's reading of the law is wrong, and that private companies have larger powers than he attributes to them, further legislation would be imperatively called for. If his judgment is affirmed, or not challenged, we may rest con- tent with the law as it is.
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