iles. A certain number of men are elected by the stockholders to be
directors, and these directors elect a president. This president is the
head of the undertaking, and the directors are its managers.

Now, do the workingmen employed by that stock corporation deal with that
president and those directors? Not at all. Does the public deal with that
president and that board of directors? It does not. Can anybody bring them
to account? It is next to impossible to do so. If you undertake it you
will find it a game of hide and seek, with the objects of your search
taking refuge now behind the tree of their individual personality, now
behind that of their corporate irresponsibility.

And do our laws take note of this curious state of things? Do they even
attempt to distinguish between a man's act as a corporation director and
as an individual? They do not. Our laws still deal with us on the basis of
the old system. The law is still living in the dead past which we have
left behind. This is evident, for instance, with regard to the matter of
employers' liability for workingmen's injuries. Suppose that a
superintendent wants a workman to use a certain piece of machinery which
it is not safe for him to use, and that the workman is injured by that
piece of machinery. Some of our courts have held that the superintendent
is a fellow-servant, or, as the law states it, a fellow-employee, and
that, therefore, the man cannot recover damages for his injury. The
superintendent who probably engaged the man is not his employer. Who is
his employer? And whose negligence could conceivably come in there? The
board of directors did not tell the employee to use that piece of
machinery; and the president of the corporation did not tell him to use
that piece of machinery. And so forth. Don't you see by that theory that a
man never can get redress for negligence on the part of the employer? When
I hear judges reason upon the analogy of the relationships that used to
exist between workmen and their employers a generation ago, I wonder if
they have not opened their eyes to the modern world. You know, we have a
right to expect that judges will have their eyes open, even though the law
which they administer hasn't awakened.

Yet that is but a single small detail illustrative of the difficulties we
are in because we have not adjusted the law to the facts of the new order.

* * * * *

Since I entered politics, I have chi