ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE and special statutory provision for their settlement by arbitration or otherwise be made. These are the cases which create most irritation against the courts among the poor. This is peculiarly true in such cases in the federal courts. No one can have sat upon the Federal Bench as I did for eight or nine years and not realize how defective the administration of justice in these cases must have seemed to the defeated plaintiff, whether he was the legless or armless employee himself or his personal representative. A non-resident rail way corporation had removed the case which had been brought in the local court of the county in which the injured employee lived to the federal court, held, it may be, at a town forty or one hundred miles away. To this place at great expense the plaintiff was obliged to carry his witnesses. The case came on for trial, the evidence was produced, and under the strict federal rule as to contributory negligence or as to non liability for the negligence of fellow-ser vants, the judge was obliged to direct the jury to return a verdict for the defendant. Then the plaintiff's lawyer had to explain to him that if he had been able to remain in the state court a different rule of liability of the company would have obtained and he would have recovered a verdict. How could a litigant thus defeated, after incurring the heavy expenses incident to litigation in the federal court, with nothing to show for it, have any other feeling than that the federal courts were instruments of injustice and not justice, and that they were organized to defend corporations and not to help the poor to their rights. I am glad to be able to say that under the Interstate Commerce Employers' Liability Act much of this occasion for bitterness against the federal courts and their administration of justice will be removed, and I believe it would greatly add to the popular confidence in the fed eral courts if a federal statute were enacted by which under proper limitations official arbitration could be provided for settling the awards to employees so desiring in such
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cases as arise in the carrying on of interstate commerce. We cannot of course dispense • with the jury system. It is that which makes the people a part of the administra tion of justice and prevents the possibility of government oppression; but every means by which in civil cases litigants may be induced voluntarily to avoid the expense, delay, and burden of jury trials ought to be encouraged, because in this way the general administration of justice can be greatly facilitated and the expense inci dent to delay in litigation can be greatly reduced. I listened with professional pride yester day, as every lawyer must have done, to the deserved encomiums which Senator Lindsay paid to the members of our profession and their willing sacrifices in every crisis in our country's history. Certainly no one has a profounder admiration than I have for the important part which the members of our profession must play in making a permanent success of self-government. I venture to suggest, however, that in respect to these details of our profession, these technicalities out of which can grow real abuses, there is sometimes a disposition on the part of the members of our profession to treat litigants as made for the courts and the lawyers, and not the courts and lawyers as made for litigants. As it is lawyers who in judicial committees of the legislature draft the codes of procedure, there is not as strong an impelling force as there ought to be to make the final disposition of cases as short as possible. There is a story among the traditions of our Ohio bar that a Mr. Nash, who had written a book generally used to aid practi tioners in Ohio before the adoption of the code of procedure in 1851, was very indig nant at the enactment of that new measure, and he severely condemned it. He said that the cede was a barbarous arrangement under which a suit could be brought against one man, judgment taken against another, and an execution issued upon that judgment against any good man in the state of Ohio. Now our
