Workmen's Compensation adopt others which shall suit existing facts and remedy existing evils. That must be done by the legislature. But when tardy statutes are promulgated, the courts should interpret them as favorably as their terms will allow, and not proceed to shackle them with the discredited common law manacles." Freund, in his treatise on "The Police Power," says: "The principle that inevitable loss should be borne, not by the person who profits by the dangerous business to which the loss is incident, embodies a very intelligent idea of jus tice and which seems to be in accord with modern social sentiment. ... It also underlies the rule of respondeat superior since the employer cannot re lieve himself from liability for the act done by the servant within the scope of his employment by proof of the greatest possible care in the selection of the servant. Logic and consistency therefore demand that liability, irre^pective of negligence, should noc be de nounced as unconstitutional. The re quired element of causation may readily be found in the voluntary employment of dangerous instruments or agencies." (Freund, The Police Power, Sec. 634.) The Supreme Court of Washington, in its iecent decision sustaining the compulsory workmen's insurance and compensation law of that state, says: "The test of the validity of such a law is not found in the inquiry: Does it do the objectionable things? But it is found rather in the inquiry: Is there no reasonable ground to believe that the public safety, health, or general welfare is promoted thereby?" (State ex rel. v. Clausen, 117 Pac. 1101, 1106.) The Court later goes on to say that the test of a police regulation, when meas ured by the "due process of law" clause of the Constitution, is "reasonableness, as contradistinguished from arbitrary
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or capricious action." The intention of that clause of the Constitution was "to prevent the arbitrary exercise of power, or undue, unjust and capricious interference with personal rights; not to prevent those reasonable regulations that all must submit to as a condition of remaining a member of society." In the recent case before the Supreme Court of the United States involving the constitutionality of the Oklahoma Bank Depositors' Guarantee law, which authorizes the collection of sums from each bank in the state to form an in demnity fund out of which are paid losses caused depositors by failing and insolvent banks, Mr. Justice Holmes, delivering the opinion of the Court, says: "In the first place, it is established by a series of cases that an ulterior public advantage may justify a comparatively insignificant taking of private property for what, in its immediate purpose, is a private use." (Citing Clark v. Nash, 198 U. S. 361; Strickley v. Highland Boy-Mining Co., 200 U. S. 527, 531; Offield v. N. Y. N. H. & H. Ry. Co., 203 U. S. 372; Bacon v. Walker, 204 U. S. 311, 315.) In considering the constitutionality of workmen's com pensation acts which operate through the creation of a state insurance fund; as the Washington law does, it may be well to note the following from the opin ion of Mr. Justice Holmes in the Noble State Bank case just referred to: "And ... it would seem that there may be other cases besides the everyday one of taxation, in which the share of each party in the benefit of a scheme of mu tual protection is sufficient compensa tion for the correlative burden that it is compelled to assume." (See Ohio Oil Co. v. Indiana, 177 U. S. 190.) It is a well settled rule of law that courts in passing on the constitutionality of police regulations should consider
