lessly killed in coupling cars, the easiest and best method is to compel the railroads to provide automatic couplers and to punish by fine, imprisonment, or otherwise any refusal to comply with this regulation. To prevent men from being needlessly mangled by machinery, it is only necessary to compel by law the fencing of such machines and to appoint inspectors to see that the fencing is properly done. This has been the method usually adopted in the factory and mining laws of many nations and of the various states of this country. New York and Massachusetts have been especially energetic. in passing good laws and securing their enforcement. Where it has been found difficult, however, to obtain the enactment or effective enforcement of factory laws, attempts have been made to protect the lives of the workmen indirectly, by making the killing of employees too expensive a pastime. This has been accomplished in England by the passage of a compulsory insurance law, and in France, Germany, Austria, Italy, and a number of other Continental countries, provision is made for compulsory compensation of injured employees. A necessity for some form of compensation undoubtedly exists in the United States, owing to the inadequacy of the law in this regard.

Under the common law of England and of the United States, an employer is responsible for the action of his workmen in the course of their employment, very much as a principal is responsible for the actions of his agents. However, in the celebrated case of Priestley vs. Fowler, decided in 1837, the law was laid down by a certain learned judge that a servant could not recover from his master when the injury was due to the negligence of a fellow servant; and this decision has become imbedded in English law through a succession of judgments adverse to injured workingmen. Even at that time the decision was unjust, but with every advance in industrial development, it has become more grievous. When two journeymen. carpenters were working on the same job with their employer, it might or might not be just to relieve the employer of responsibility for injury inflicted in the course of employment by one workingman upon the other;

but at the present time the distinction is utterly vicious. Under the law as it exists to-day, where not modified by statute, all the passengers in a train may recover for an accident due to the carelessness of a switchman or the negligence of a telegraph operator, except only the engineer, fireman, brakeman, and conductor, though killed in the performance of their duty and without any contributory negligence. No matter though the person guilty of negligence has never been seen or heard of by the injured workman, no matter though he serves in a different department or in a different country, no matter though he is the workman's superior and capable of giving him orders, there is still no possibility of recovering, because all are covered by the blanket of common service. In the large industrial establishments of to-day, employing thousands of workingmen, one hand cannot know what the other hand doeth; yet, as the law stands in most American states and as it stood in England until recently, no workingman can recover damages for injury inflicted upon him by any one of five, ten, twenty, or fifty thousand fellow-servants. The employer is, of course, responsible for his own individual carelessness or malice, but in the huge, anonymous corporations of to-day, such as the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Standard Oil Company, who is the employer?

About thirty years ago, the trade unionists of Great Britain, especially the coal miners and railway employees, despairing of the enactment and rigid enforcement of laws safeguarding the workingman, determined to remedy the employers' liability law and to mulct the companies in damages for injuries to their workmen. After much agitation, they secured, in 1880, the passage of an employers' liability law, making the employer in certain industries responsible for injuries to workmen when the accident was due to the negligence of superintendents, managers, foremen, or through obedience to improper rules or orders. Within two years, however, the decisions of the court rendered the law nugatory by allowing the employers to "contract out." By these decisions, it was held that if a workman received notice that he must forego his rights under the act and accept instead a claim to

a benefit club established by the employer (to which the workman himself was obliged to contribute largely), he was held to have entered into a valid contract to surrender his rights. In 1897, however, the act was widely extended and compelled employers in the trades affected, including about one-third of all British workmen, to compensate their workmen for all injuries suffered in the course of their employment, whether caused by negli

gence or not.

This legislation, however, while extremely beneficial to the employee, has not been successful in compassing its original object. It is unfortunately true of modern industrial life that in the majority of cases it is cheaper to kill men and pay for them than to go to the expense of making suitable provision for preventing accidents. It is useless for trade unionists to shut their eyes to the fact that an employer, if unscrupulous, will pay occasional damages for employees who are killed and injured, if compelled to do so by law, rather than take the expensive precautions necessary for preventing the accident. The employer can and does insure himself against accidents to his workingmen and thus finds it cheaper, if less humane, to kill than to save. In the matter of accidents, it not infrequently happens that an ounce of prevention costs more than a pound of cure.

But what the workir gmen desire and demand is not so much compensation for injury as prevention of injury. The workingman who, through no fault of his own, is killed or maimed or permanently disabled in an industry should receive from that industry or from the state, either directly or through his heirs, a suitable compensation, whether the injury is due to the negligence of the employer or not. It is inhuman to permit disabled workingmen to starve, it is inhuman to permit widows and orphans of men who have died in the performance of their duty to be left without suitable provision for their future maintenance. The workman, however, demands even more strenuously and justly that all possible measures be taken to prevent accidents. It is well to receive a thousand dollars for the loss of an eye or a leg, but it is better by far for the man, as for society, that the eye