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n conflict alike with the progress of civilization, the spirit of democracy, the principles of social justice, and the analogies and tendencies of law. And we believe that this unconscious attempt to fasten upon the workingman an unjust and intolerable burden from which all other civilized nations, with one exception, have relieved him, will ultimately prove as futile as was the conscious and deliberate attempt of the United States Supreme Court, under the lead of Chief Justice Taney, to halt the movement for the emancipation of the slaves. In the earlier stages of industrial development, when industry was unorganized, machinery hardly existed, and labor was an individual handicraft, the courts naturally assumed that accidents occurring to a workman were probably due to his own negligence. If he were mowing in a field and cut himself with his scythe, if he were digging a ditch and sprained his ankle, if he were cutting down a tree and it fell upon him and broke his leg, he could recover from his employer only on proof that his employer was at fault. Nor could he recover if the accident were due to the carelessness of a fellow workman. There was always a natural presumption that he could better guard against such carelessness than could the probably absent employer. If he were turning a grindstone and his awkward fellow workman so held the scythe as to cut him, if he were in the forest and his fellow workman gave no notice of the falling tree, it was natural to presume that the carelessness was shared between the two, and the law would neither attribute blame to the employer nor levy the damage upon him when he was not blameworthy. But the organization of labor and the creation of elaborate machinery has destroyed this presumption of the common sense, and therefore in all civilized countries has destroyed this presumption of law. When a railway train runs off the track because of a misplaced switch or a defective rail, there is no presumption that the engineer was careless or could have guarded against the carelessness of the switch tender or of the manufacturer of the rail. When a fire breaks out in a room where scores of shirt-waist makers are confined at their work and a hundred and forty of them are burned to death, there is no presumption that the impossibility of their escape through narrow passageways and a locked door was due to their carelessness, or that they were to blame because the tables at which they
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