Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/606

586 aware that the employer or such superior already knew of the said defect or negligence.

The amount of compensation recoverable under this act may not exceed such sum as may be found to be equivalent to the estimated earnings, during the three years preceding the injury, of a person in the same grade employed during those years in the like employment and in the district in which the workman is employed at the time of the injury; but under our various State laws, when interpreted by juries, the measure of damages is usually severely onerous, if the employer be a railroad corporation, and, even when such cases are appealed to higher judicial tribunals, the tax costs are very heavy. In Germany, railroads—whether owned or controlled by the Government, or owned and managed by corporations—are not only legally compelled to assess their employés for the benefit of authorized relief funds, but are required to contribute thereto from their corporate funds—generally in amounts equaling the premiums collected from their members; and conformity to this regulation is invariably required in all the working departments of the roads.

In Great Britain, it has become quite general for employers to seek release from personal liability, or from costs for damages or partial indemnity, by either subscribing to the several employés' liability insurance companies or by wide-spread attempts to evade their responsibilities under the law by inducing the workmen to contract themselves out of the act. Several other methods of securing release from liability have been devised, the most prominent of which, perhaps, is the length to which defendants go in the appeal courts.

The employés of most American railroads are incessantly confronted with petitions for charitable contributions in aid of their fellow-workmen and companions overtaken by misfortunes, which almost always involve others dependent upon them for the necessities and comforts of existence. Such appeals to people too generally living in the presence and under the dread of the embarrassments and evils incident to interrupted wages can seldom be ignored, though often their alms frequently materially encroach upon the previously mortgaged incomes of men engaged in pursuits than which few are more exacting, and that taxed their abilities and time to such an extent as precluded the possibility of supplementing through extra labor wages reduced by competition to barely living rates. The higher officials of the company are constantly importuned in the same direction, and the contributions they feel constrained to make sometimes reach considerable sums. The recipients of such charity naturally experience a sense of humiliation; their self-respect is lowered, and upon recovery from sickness or injuries they too frequently resume their occupations handicapped by the discontent and restlessness of debtors, to whom such condition is too novel and harassing to be borne with equanimity. From this results constant anxiety to better their condition, and it