194
THE GREEN BAG
of an injured man, without any acquaint ance with, or authority from, the injured party, and the latter (being ignorant of our legal procedure, as well as of our lan guage) has later been persuaded that the court had appointed the attorney in ques tion to secure justice for the injured person. When the younger members of the pro fession, who begin with little, if any busi ness, see that apparent success is attained by such methods, can we be surprised that many of them yield to the temptation to follow in these courses? 3. But the public is, perhaps, even more interested in the results to the injured em ployees. Under our present system of laws, unless the master is in some respect at fault, the servant, who may be totally incapaci tated by injuries received while in the per formance of his work (perhaps, with no fault of his own), is left as a charge upon public or private charity. The question has frequently arisen in my mind, where have all of the injured employees of our grow ing factories gone to? What are they now doing? Surely the public at large is inter ested in seeing that these people are pro vided with sufficient means to continue an existence, without being a burden upon the public. A remedy for the evils, which are here merely suggested, is a matter much to be desired. I am satisfied that both employer and employee would welcome a solution of the matter, upon any basis which would be reasonably fair to their respective inter ests. Although, doubtless, the remedy must be applied by the legislature, yet it is only to the legal profession that we can look for advice upon, and the framing of, provisions which will meet the situation. We should appreciate the fact that something is going to be done, and it rests with the legal pro fession to see to it that satisfactory legisla tion is enacted. On the one hand, laws which increase the measure of liability of the master, or which lessen that liability, will not solve the prob
lem; they will do but little more than aggra vate the situation. To illustrate : our legisla ture not long since prohibited the employ ment of children under sixteen years of age in factories, etc. The Supreme Court con strued this statute so that the master, prac tically, becomes liable for every injury received by an employee under sixteen years of age. The fact that the boy, or his parents, represented him to be over six teen years of age at the time of his employ ment does not alter the situation. The consequence of this legislation is that any reasonably prudent employer will refuse to employ, and will discharge if already employed, any boy or girl who from appearance might possibly not be sixteen years of age. Although the child labor laws are much to be commended, yet the fact that a boy, perhaps over sixteen years of age, cannot find employment is, in many cases, a serious evil, both for the boy him self and, also, for those to whose support he should be learning to contribute. In many cases, employers have estab lished some system of insurance for their employees, which is intended to provide means of support for those who become injured in service and, undoubtedly, these and similar associations have accomplished much good. At the same time, these pro visions apply only to a small minority of workmen and, also, they do not furnish a remedy to the evils I have above sug gested. They leave the employee open to pursue his remedies under the law against the master, and I doubt very much whether they lessen litigation as much as is gener ally supposed. As far as I am informed, the Workmen's Compensation Act of 1897, adopted by the English Parliament, is the only legislation, in countries governed by the English com mon law, which attempts to substitute, for the common law theory' of the master's liability, a system of compensation to the workmen, irrespective of the cause of his injuries. It seems to me that legislation
