As Governor of New York, Mr. Hughes had been a pioneer in constructive steps for the development of an adequate and scientific system of compensation to injured employés for those disabilities which are a natural risk and concomitant of industry. As far back as 1909, two years before the enactment of the Wisconsin workmen's compensation law, Governor Hughes had sent to the New York Legislature the following recommendation, upon which the Legislature acted in authorising the creation of the so-called Wainwright Commission:

I recommend that provision be made for special and expert inquiry into the questions relating to employers' liability and compensation for workmen's injuries. Our present methods are wasteful and result in injustice. Numbers of negligence cases are prosecuted upon a basis which gives the attorney a high percentage of recoveries. Only a small percentage of the premiums paid for insurance against liability is devoted to payment of lesses. As a result the workmen do not receive proper compensation and employers pay large amounts that do not reach them. There are constitutional restrictions which stand in the way of some of the remedies which have been devised in other countries; but the subject should be thoroughly examined to the end that the present waste and injustice should be mitigated to the fullest extent that may be found to be at once practicable and consistent with the provisions of our fundamental law.

Upon the recommendation of the Wainwright Commission, the Legislature passed a workmen's compensation law which was a pioneer of its kind and performed a valuable experimental service in clarifying the fundamental law as to the policy and scope of legislation in this field. In approving the Wainwright bill, which was afterwards held unconstitutional by the New York Court of Appeals in the well-known Ives case, thereby clearing the way for a needed amendment of the State Constitution and the passage of a more comprehensive and admirable Compensation Act, Governor Hughes said:

Existing conditions with regard to employers' liability and compensation for workmen's injuries are so unjust that there should be remedial action. . . . The present methods are satisfactory neither to employer nor employed and the rules of law governing legal liability offend the commonsense of fairness. The importance of providing a suitable scheme of compensation for industrial acidents and of avoiding the shocking waste of injustice of our present methods must be conceded by all openminded students of industrial conditions. It is difficult to devise any method of compensation which will not be visited with severe criticism and a satisfactory solution of the problem can only be reached by experimentation.

'Ives vs. South Buffalo Ry. Co. (201 N. Y. Reports, page 271).

In the field of indemnity or recovery for industrial accidents, Justice Hughes' opinions in the Supreme Court manifest a broad and sympathetic outlook upon the activities of the State legislatures. In Chicago, B. & Q. Railway Company against McGuire, argued a few months after Justice Hughes went upon the bench, he held that the Iowa Legislature had the right to prohibit contracts between railway companies and their employés limiting the latter's right to recover damages at common law for injuries in the course of employment, and that this prohibition might be made effective against even a so-called "relief plan," to which both the company and the employés contributed, and which was by its terms supposed to bar and be in substitution for any recovery by the employé through action at law. To a very similar effect was his ruling in Philadelphia, B. & W. Railway Company against Schubert," where the prohibition against exemptions from liability was contained in the Federal Employers' Liability Act of 1908. He joined repeatedly in upholding the constitutionality of State statutes abrogating or modifying the "fellow1219 U. S. Reports, pago 349.

224 U. 8. Reports, page 603.

•Mobile, etc., R. R. Co. vs. Turnipseed (219 U. 8. 35), upholding the Mississippi statute in 1910; Chicago, B. & I. R. R. Co. vs. McGuire (219 U. 8. 549), upholding the Iowa statute in 1911; and Aluminum Co. vs. Ramsey (222 U. 8. 251), upholding the Arkansas statute in 1911.

servant doctrine"-the outgrown concept that an injured employé was barred of recovery if the accident was due to the fault of a fellow employé.

CHAPTER VI

"THE PAPER-BOX FACTORY GIRL AND THE

CONSTITUTION"

THE greatest Court in the world is a very human institution. It deals with palpitating human issues in a very direct, common-sense, human way, and it knows it is dealing with them dealing with them finally, at least so far as the rights and happiness of the human beings before the Court in the particular case are concerned. Those who think of the Supreme Court as an impersonal aggregation of men with mechanical minds, leading a cloistered life and indifferent to the happenings and welfare of a workaday world, have never sat in that courtroom and watched the way in which these nine black-robed men address themselves to the human as well as the legal phases of the cases argued before them, after they have come across the Capitol corridors at noon in impressive file, between ropes of red plush temporarily extended from their robing-rooms to give them avenue. The members of this Court realise what governments, Constitutions, laws, decisions, precedents, courts, law-suits, appeals, arguments, are all about and what in the final

136

analysis these man-created instrumentalities are and should serve, and they appear to work decidedly hard to keep all these instrumentalities in accord and in service for the ultimate welfare of the men and women who make up, and in the years to come will make up, the Nation.

In the Survey magazine,1 Miss Mary Chamberlain once wrote down very vividly her impressions of the direct and open-minded way in which the Supreme Court hears argument on vital issues of human rights and "keeps its eyes on the main issue":

"OYEZ, OYEZ, OYEZ God save the United States and this honourable court," chants the marshal of the highest tribunal in America as the black-robed justices file to their places.

"Save, also," he might add, "the nine million working women who to-day are pleading for health and energy, for some joyousness in living and for the welfare of their children."

For this afternoon, December 17, 1914, the first case involving the constitutionality of a law to provide minimum wages.for women in industry and upheld by unanimous bench in the Supreme Court of Oregon is come to trial before the Supreme Court of the United States. On the court's decision will probably depend

1 Issue of December 26, 1914. "The Paper-Box Factory Girl and the Constitution," by Miss Mary Chamberlain.