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 EMPLOYERS' LIABILITY AS AN INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM ing warped boards, of the rapid feeding of machines, of the repeating of stamping dies and cutters, of belts slipping from loose to tight pulleys, and generally of the thousand and one causes which go to make modern methods more hazardous for the workman than those of his great-grandfather's time. It appears, in short, that the Moloch of industrial activity demands a sacrifice of hu man life and limb, constant, as the actuaries tables show, and inevitable so long as hu man contrivances and human understanding are fallible. It is obvious that for losses such as these some one must pay. In the first instance, it is the workman himself. In the long run, however, there is an economic loss that is charged upon the community— and this to the accompaniment of individual hardship of a peculiarly distressing nature. Observing this, European governments with scarcely an exception, have devised schemes by which the loss falls upon the consumer of the commodity, the manufacture of which has demanded the sacrifice. In the United States, while fire, deterioration of plant, and financial loss are insured against, and the insurance, whatever form it may take, is charged to the cost of production, no ac count is taken of the deterioration of the human machine. It is only a blind worshipper of common law doctrine who sees no problem here or who finds it solved by the law as it stands to-day. It is not a question to be determined by the stern justice of a Mosaic retribution; it is an economic problem — a problem that has stirred an entire continent of states and caused probably more sweeping legislation and radical revision of economic policy than any problem of modern times — not even excluding our own drastic surgery in deal ing with the question of slavery. But before taking up in detail this Eu ropean legislation and its operation, let us consider further the conditions as they are with us. The application of our personal injury laws has developed a brood of abuses which in a community less easy going than

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ours would have been strangled almost at birth. Some of these abuses, while common to all phases of that enormous docket of liti gation that is piling up ahead of us in all our courts, are peculiarly obnoxious in the field of employers' liability. Take for instance that insidious practice of fomenting litigation by the employment of "runners." There was a notorious case not long ago in one of our larger cities, where the day after a street car collision, thirtyfour suits were brought from one office in favor of passengers. Drug stores and bar rooms are subsidized; it is carefully noised abroad that so and so is good for twenty-five dollars if a safe case is sent him. This sort of thing bears peculiarly hard upon the workman; for, while his case has rarely much merit, the employer or his in surance company will almost always pay something less than the cost of trial to settle the matter. There is almost always enough prospect of a small settlement to tempt the unscrupulous to work up a claim which shall net something for the counsel if little for the client. But putting the claim in the hands of a lawyer means inevitably the sacrifice of the claimant's job. A case in most of our large cities must wait at least two years before it reaches a jury. The cost of a trial is large and since this must come but of the lawyer's pocket unless a verdict is won., he makes the cases that he wins pay for those that he loses. A handsome verdict is pared down, by counsel's and doctor's commissions and thecost of trial, to such an extent that a plaintiff would gener ally fare better if he had taken the bedside settlement offered by the claim agent of the insurance company — one who is in a posi tion to apply literally the principle of bis, dat qui cito dat very much to his own advan tage. Many an uninsured employer would pay comparatively liberally if he did not know that his money instead of going to his injured workman, must pass across the itch ing palm of counsel. The practice, now so general, of insuring