ADDRESS OF EDWARD P. LYON (of the New York Bar, formerly member of Workmen's Compensation Commission) MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN OF THE ASSOCIATION: I hope I may be pardoned for having put upon paper and reading what I have to say about this law, which is still a good deal of an innovation and little understood. This course will, at least, indicate that I possess terminal facilities. I shall not attempt to discuss in any detail the various provisions of the law, but will content myself with a statement of the defects which had grown up in the law of negligence which many felt made the situation almost intolerable, the reasons for the new law, its general scope, and the spirit in which the New York State Industrial Commission approaches its administration and carries it out, and what, in my opinion, should be the future policy of the state toward its execution. There were certain hard-and-fast rules which had grown up in the negligence law as between employer and employee. Among them the doctrine of contributory negligence, the assumption of the risk by the employee and the co-servant rule. The latter two were perfectly logical and just when industry was simple, and before the advent of complicated machinery. When the employer had few employees and himself worked with his men, and all in that employment were personally acquainted with each other and knew each the other's habits, the rule that the employer (who was practically on a par with all his men) should not be responsible for the negligence of his workmen was perfectly fair, and just. So, too, when the work was done by hand and with simple tools, it was just that the employee should be held to have assumed the risk of injury from the tools with which he worked. But when industry became concentrated in great factories where great numbers of men, strangers to each other's habits, are gathered together and use powerful and rapidly moving machinery, which the employer rarely sees and never uses, the rule that the servant assumes the risk of accident from all this machinery in the hands of a coservant, whom he has no voice in choosing and no way of discharging, if found careless, works a great hardship upon men who are compelled by the necessities of the case to work in such conditions or see their families suffer privation. At all events the application of these rules made it possible for the employer, generally, to throw the economic loss from accidents to human beings in industry upon that part of the community least able, financially, to bear it. Then, too, there grew up the feeling that the public, the consumer, ought in justice to pay for the human wear and tear in industry, as it always has the mechanical wear and tear. If you mend a broken machine and throw the expense upon the product, why not mend a man injured in the same industry, or if he is beyond repair give him something in lieu of mending, and charge the expense to the product, and that, too, altogether apart from the question of fault, just as in the case of a machine. That this is the underlying theory of the compensation law is shown by the fact that the amendment to the constitution consequent upon the decision of the Ives case, which held the first act unconstitutional, provides "that all moneys paid by an employer to his employees or their legal representatives, by reason of the enactment of any law or laws herein authorized, shall be held to be a proper charge in the cost of operating the business of the employer" (Const. Art. I, Sec. 19). Under the common law as applied to modern conditions, not only was it impossible, in most cases, for an employee to recover at all from his employer for injury received in the employment, on account of the rules already referred to, but if he did recover, it was only after a protracted litigation and various appeals, so that during the period of his greatest need, he had nothing but hope and a lawsuit to live on, but what made matters still worse, the plaintiff generally had no means with which to employ a lawyer or conduct the litigation. He was therefore compelled, in order to maintain his rights at all, to agree in advance to a heavy contingent fee, and when, if ever, the suit resulted in a cash recovery, a large share went to the lawyer and the balance came when the greatest need for it was over, if indeed it had not been pledged to friends who had supported the injured and his family during the litigation. No more extravagant way of getting reimbursement to an injured workman for injury could be imagined. But there was a worse evil. The lawyers who came to make a specialty of negligence cases, being compelled to recoup their losses on the cases lost, came to have the reputation of fostering litigation and promoting perjury in their trials. Ambulance chasing not only came to be a regular and profitable occupation, but brought the whole administration of the negligence law into disrepute. The whole situation came to be well-nigh intolerable. It was felt that some system should be devised by which the public, which ultimately had to bear the loss of industrial accidents in any event, could protect itself from the rapacity of unscrupulous lawyers, and protect the body of workingmen, by a system that would insure to the injured workmen a remedy that should be certain, speedy and without expense, so that the relief would come at the time when most needed and not be diverted in large part to defray the expense of procuring it. There was also a demand that the loss from inevitable or stupidly caused accidents should not be visited on the unhappy victim, |