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Montesquieu.

of the Straits Settlements was imposing on little Malay children the duty of compulsory attendance at school, and the legislature of Sierra Leone was regulating Mohammedan education on Western lines, whatever that may mean. It is perhaps in the field of industrial legislation that this similarity of treatment and of trend is most remarkable. A quarter of a century ago the liability of employers for injuries to their workmen was in every civilized country regulated by rules derived directly or indirectly from the old Roman law. Since that time almost every legislature has been altering those rules, and has been altering them in the same direction. It has been recognized everywhere that the principle of basing liability on personal negligence is inadequate to meet the modern conditions of corporate employment, of employment by great companies, and the universal tendency has been towards placing the employer in the position of an insurer against accidents to his workmen, and of thus imposing on him a risk which he again meets by modern methods of insurance. Similar tendencies may be observed in other departments of industrial legislation, such as the further recognition of the right of workmen to combine, the regulation of the conditions of employment, especially in such organized employments as mines and factories, the restrictions on the employment of women and children, the requirement of precautions against risk to health and life, the formation of Government pension funds against sickness and old age, and the provisions for the settlement of labour disputes. In all these branches of legislation there is a general move in the same direction, though with differences of detail and at different rates of progress. In short, the whole civilized world appears to be advancing