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ple may be waiting about court for four or five days during the trial, and may have had to be there for a day or more before the trial began.

It centers in an incident that took piaceso quickly and quietly that no one would naturally observe it carefully at the time-a year or two before the trial. Mr. Jones was coming home in a street car after his day's work at the mill, and as he got off he fell. The first question now is, "What caused the fall?" This sounds simple, but it splits up into many issues. Did the fall occur at the usual stopping-place of the car? Had the car come to a full stop before Jones tried to get off? Had Jones been given time to alight? Did the conductor " give the two bells" to start the car before Mr. Jones got off? Was Mr. Jones getting off facing the front of the car or facing the rear? Did he step off or jump off? Did the car start up before Jones was clear of it? Where was the conductor when he gave the signal-on the platform or in the car? Had Jones paid his fare? Had he, before taking the car, made a stop at the nearest bar? Every one of these points, and others, may have to be gone into with the greatest detail, and the witnesses, most of whom did not know that there was any trouble until after Jones's fall, theoretically at least stake their souls upon testimony as to details that might have escaped the notice of a Sherlock Holmes.

What was the effect of the fall on Mr. Jones? This opens up a second set of questions. Did he suffer? How much did he suffer? Was he rendered unable to work? Will he be able to work again? On this point there will be sharply discordant testimony of doctors for the plaintiff and doctors for the defendant. And what was Jones's condition "prior to " the accident (no attorney or witness ever says "before" the accident)? On this point Mr. Jones's wife, his children, his minister (if he has one), his friends, and his doctor, tell his life story.

Each witness is examined, cross-examined, and perhaps re-examined and recross-examined-the cross-examination frequently, some one has said, turning an honest man into the appearance of a scared and perjured rabbit. The jury may listen if they choose, but they cannot take notes. Counsel for the company then argues, doing his utmost to win some consideration for the corporation. Jones's lawyer then makes a moving appeal, enlarg

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ing on the virtues of Jones, the need of his family, and the wealth of the company. The

judge talks to the jury, wholly about the law, for, though he is the only trained and impartial person that sits through the trial, he is generally forbidden to give the jury the benefit of his seasoned judgment as to what, out of the welter of conflicting testimony, may be taken to be the real facts. The jury then goes out and brings in a verdict for Jones or for the company, as it may choose, sometimes with some regard for the merits, and in an amount reached by some process thoroughly mysterious.

The verdict by no means ends the matter. Either party may take the case to the court of last resort, and if the amount of the verdict is of any size the corporation is likely to appeal. This means a further delay of six months or a year before the court considering the case on a printed record prepared with much labor and expense decides whether the verdict of the jury is to stand. If the higher court decides that there was material error of law in the trial, a new trial may be ordered, and the whole process may be repeated.

He

This procedure is most unsatisfactory to Jones. Assume that he is honest in his claim. and that he received an injury which for some time prevented him from working to support his family; for a year before his case could be heard he may have had to remain in idleness. Not a dollar could he get from the company in the time of his need. had to pay his doctor's bills, and, to enforce his claim, he had to employ a lawyer, with the certainty that he would have to pay him a considerable portion of such amount as he might recover. As to what he would ultimately be awarded, if anything, he was left in the dark. His lawyer could not tell him. After all his worry, his waiting, his trouble and expense, he might recover nothing. If he wanted to settle his case, there was no way for him to tell what he was entitled to receive. And the company is no better off.

It might seem that this system is advantageous for the company. If it had to deal only with the case of Mr. Jones, it might get off pretty well, but the fact is that it has to deal with a constant series of such claims. For this purpose it must have men upon its staff trained and ready to investigate every accident as soon as it occurs. It must have lawyers to prepare most of the cases for trial, and it must proceed very cautiously in the settlement even of honest claims, for if it

It is

allows the belief to get abroad that the company is readily inclined to settle, cases will steadily multiply. Yet, ready as the company must be to insist upon the establishment of all claims by suit, the result of a trial in any given case is likely to be unfavorable. the injured Jones, and not the corporation, that makes a human appeal to the jury. Handle these cases as best they may, the corporations are bound to be the victims of fraud. In large centers of population certain lawyers and doctors make a business of instigating and prosecuting these suits. "Ambulance chasers" bring in the claims. The evidence produced is likely to be precisely what the exigencies of the case require. City companies usually find that their expenses for handling these cases are likely to run up to from four to six per cent or more of their total annual receipts. With a large company this may mean an annual expenditure of upwards of half a million dollars.

And what about the public?

The State at its own expense maintains a costly setting for carrying on these wearisome accident contests. Court-houses, judges, clerks, juries, stenographers, and attachés are provided. No part of this expense is directly borne by the parties. In no small degree the just feeling of deep annoyance at the law's delay is due to the congestion of the courts with such causes.

What is the reason for all this?

The lawyer's explanation is historical and theoretical. Fault, he would say, has come to be the basis for determining one man's liability to another for the consequences of his acts. If the fault of the company causes harm to Jones, the company should be required to pay Jones money to make him whole, though if both are to blame Jones should suffer the entire loss, because he ought to be careful on behalf of both-though his babies may be sent to an orphanage. To find the fault and the damage, go to court and fight it out.

Why should liability in these cases turn upon fault? The real question for the public, which pays all the bills and has to get along under the system, should be, "What is the best conceivable method of securing a fair readjustment in society of the crippled Jones and the little Joneses?" Whatever the answer, the present system is the poorest.

The method now followed in dealing with injured employees under the workmen's compensation acts in various States points

the way. Let the company become the insurer of the safety of its passengers up to a reasonable amount against any injury sustained in their transportation other than through their own palpably gross neglect. Under such a system the compensation for each injury would be according to a preestablished table carefully worked out by experts, and would be promptly payable through the instrumentality of a commission established for the purpose.

Accidents, however caused, unless by the gross or willful default of the passenger, would be dealt with as a risk to which the carrying on of the business exposes the passengers, and for which the company should. be required to provide reasonable compensation as an operating expense. At the same time the idea that the transportation company must pay the full money equivalent of each injury would be given up. It is impossible to estimate pain and suffering in dollars and cents, and it is even exceedingly difficult to estimate the precise financial damage caused by a particular injury. The table of awards would have to be worked out so as to afford reasonable compensation to the average person of the class principally using the cars. In return for the right to recover prompt and sure compensation without payment to intermediaries, the passenger would sacrifice the possibility of recovering a great sum in a particular case. Those who believed that the statutory table would give them insufficient protection would reasonably be expected to take advantage for additional protection of accident insurance written by companies carried on for that purpose. It is now possible to obtain such policies at fairly low cost.

But this is a radical proposal"! The workmen's compensation acts now so widely established made a similar departure, yet few would to-day suggest going back to the common-law handling of the claims of injured employees. As the laws stand to-day, a passenger injured in a railway accident may have a long and bitter contest to recover any damages, while the employee of the company whose negligence is claimed to have caused the accident secures prompt compensation from the company without suit. How long should such a discrimination be continued?

The financial burdens of companies for injury claims would not be increased under such a plan. They would probably be decreased. Something would be payable in

1916

every case, but the maximum amount would be limited and a huge percentage of the total present expenditure that goes to various intermediaries would be largely saved. There I should be an end of the fraudulent claims.

Of course Constitutional questions are involved, but they can be answered or met. The companies are quasi-public corporations. The United States Supreme Court has already held that such companies may be made absolutely liable for injuries to their passengers. It would seem reasonable that the passenger may himself be subjected to the system which applies to the company. If not, his desire to sue the company at law can be removed by the abolition in these cases of the common-law doctrine referred to as the

615

rule of "respondeat superior," which enables him to make the company pay for its employee's default. Left to pursue his legal remedy against the motorman or engineer, the passenger would be likely to elect to come in under the statutory plan.

For injured persons prompt and sure compensation without wait, worry, or waste; for companies relief from the expense of investigators and lawyers and from the burden of fraud; for the public a decrease of the great cost of maintaining the courts and the clearing of the courts for the expeditious handling of other cases-these are results which may reasonably be hoped for from the extension to railway cases of the pregnant insurance idea.

Τ'

.

HE special quality of English fiction in this tremendous crisis, as The Outlook has already noted, is its freshness. Such a story as "Mr. Britling Sees It Through" bears witness to the awakening of a nation and is charged with the spiritual energy liberated by a supreme experience; but Mr. Marriott's " Davenport "1 has until the close the air of leisure which is friendly to careful writing. This story, already commented upon, will delight those readers who do not run as they read. It is a study in psychology in which art obliterates all suggestion of the laboratory; there is a marked absence of stock characters, and one has the pleasant sensation of being with people who are not only decent but unusually interesting, with conversational gifts not often found even in the "highest circles" of fiction's society.

The transition from drawing-rooms and studios to the deck of the wind-jammer in Mr. Snaith's "The Sailor" is so abrupt as to be startling, but the standards of literary skill are not changed; as a piece of writing "The Sailor" would be an unusual story in any season. In "Broke of Covenden " Mr. Snaith drew the portrait of a proud, unbending man whom circumstances could crush,

I Davenport. By Charles Marriott. The John Lane Company, New York. $1.35.

2 The Sailor. By J. C. Snaith. D. Appleton & Co., New York. $1.50.

but could not change; in "Araminta" he gave us a delightful romance with the dew of youth on it; in this latest novel he has achieved a triumph of construction and of form which puts him in the front rank of contemporary novelists. Joseph Jefferson said that Mrs. Siddons's genius was most strikingly shown in her ability to make good women dramatically interesting; she had no need of the adventitious aid of the strong contrasts of crime, of the high lights of broken laws; Mr. Snaith has created a man of vigorous impulses, without a touch of moral consciousness, whose childhood is submerged in poverty and cruelty, who goes through six years of brutal sea life, starts his career on land in dense ignorance of the things which a man must know to live, who is buffeted and beaten almost into insensibility by unrelenting hardship, and who is the victim of a merciless woman of the worst type, but who survives and triumphs-a man with no aid from love or care, or the help of decent conditions, or the sustaining power of faith, with a dogged decency of nature that carries him through vileness and misery with a determination to keep on keeping on."

"The Sailor" is full of incident and adventure by land and sea, told with the frankness of Mr. London but without the strong repulsion which the brutalities of "The Sea Wolf " awakens. It is more than a tale of adven

ture; it is a tale of the greatest of adventures -the adventure of life-told in elementary terms, with a kind of "Robinson Crusoe" minuteness of detail, but penetrated by a glow from a central integrity of nature. The Sailor is as innocent as Parsifal and as unassailable; no temptation touches him because nothing within him responds to its appeal. His struggle with conditions is the elementary fight of a man to free himself from bondage to the accidents of life, to secure room and air and light for the free expression of his nature. The moral vigor of such a career has the tonic of fierce manhood in it, but it is as free from didacticism as "Robinson Crusoe."

Mr. Locke goes on writing modern fairy stories as if England were at leisure; and this is well both as a sign of vitality and because in such a time men sorely need the refreshment which the imagination has brought to every generation. "The Wonderful Year "1 is a pleasant tale of that pleasant country in which good manners and good inns make travel recreation. The real hero of the tale is not the clean-hearted young Englishman who revolts against the drudgery of teaching examination-French in a provincial English town and goes to Paris in pursuit of fortune, but Fortinbras, Marchand de Bonheur, one of Mr. Locke's happiest and most original creations; an unconventional magician in shabby clothes but of winning manners, of ruined fortunes and tireless kindness. In Paris the youth with the dreary background meets a girl who has escaped from a background as dreary and is a half-starved art student; and to these two, desperate in fortune and nearly bankrupt in hope, comes the "dealer in happiness," and sets them off on a bicycle tour to Brantome and the Hôtel des Grottes. The adventure has the slimmest financial foundation, but they are young and France is fair, and life is still an inviting possibility. The innkeeper and the people of the little town are sketched slightly, but with a vitality that makes the France of to-dayan organized power of sacrifice-a new nation to those who had judged the France of yesterday by its temperament rather than by its character.

The actors in this story stand out so clearly that one is almost persuaded that The Wonderful Year" is a novel and not a fairy tale, but the American girl with her millions

The Wonderful Year. By William J. Locke. The John Lane Company, New York. $1.35.

and Egyptian episode sublimate the reality, so to speak, while the war gives a touch of seriousness to the ending. Mr. Locke's novels, however lacking in probability, stabilize happiness by making it the result of kindness rather than of conditions, and further the diffusion of happiness by making the Pharisee love the publican, to quote the happy phrase of a distinguished American essayist.

In

Mr. Powys has read Russian fiction not wisely but too well, for the pessimism of the Russian does not express the depression of the English nature; it is the product of a different soil, history, and temperament. Gorky's most tragic novels there is a sense of fate; in "Rodmoor "1 the characters could have been decently happy if they had used a little common sense. No romanticist ever selected his materials more arbitrarily than has the author of this tale, very appropriately dedicated to the spirit of Emily Brontë." The scene is a little village in the fens on the east coast of England; mists of the kind that suggest melancholy and disease always rest on the landscape, the sound of the sea sets everybody's nerves on edge, the lover makes everybody unhappy in his brief vacation from two asylums for the insane, the two women who love him are driven to the very verge of madness by him, and the story ends in a dramatic coup by which the woman who is not to marry him gets him out of the asylum onto the river, floats him to the sea, and when he dies in the excitement of the escape binds herself to his body, launches him, and floats off to death on the North Sea; meantime there has been a coldblooded seduction, a suicide, a murderous assault, and a series of senseless miseries, and the end of it all is a bleak and meaningless futility. The novel is a dreary waste of a high order of ability.

Miss Lagerlöf's story of Swedish peasant life, The Emperor of Portugalia," is also a tragedy, but is full of tender human feeling. Ruffluck Croft comes to life emotionally when his child is laid in his arms; she grows into a sweet girl, and his inarticulate soul goes out to her and is bound up in her. In time the pretty child, grown into charming womanhood, goes to the city to earn the money to save the cottage from sale; the money comes just in time to save the house, but no word

1 Rodmoor. By J. C. Powys. G. Arnold Shaw, New York. $1.50.

2 The Emperor of Portugulia. By Selma Lagerlöf. Doubleday, Page & Co., New York. $1.50.

MEXICO AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

The Rev. H. C. Schuyler (Outlook, October 4, page 287) is mistaken when he states that Carranza and the Constitutionalists wish to take away, and are taking away, from Catholics property and the right to possess property. About ninety-nine per cent of the Mexican p.ople are Catholics, but by the adoption of the Constitution of 1857, after a long and bloody war, all church property was confiscated by the Government, and convents or monastic orders prohibited under penalties.

Religious orders in defiance of the Constitution of 1857 existed by sufferance in Mexico during the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, owing, doubtless, in part to the fact that the Dictator's wife was a most devoted Catholic.

Carranza and the Constitutionalists, whatever may be their sentiments in regard to it, are simply enforcing the provisions of the Constitution as they found it, unchanged, after almost threescore years. It is possible that they are enforcing the law with unwonted zeal because it is an open secret that the clerical party in Mexico has always been in sympathy with the conservative political element, or, in other words, with the Cientificos.

Piedras Negras, Mexico.

ARTURO DIX TEMPLE.

THE CUBIC MEASUREMENT OF THE WORLD'S GOLD SUPPLY

Mr. C. H. Tallmadge, of Buffalo, New York, has pointed out a serious error in the article headed: "If England Suspends Gold Payments," written by me for The Outlook of October 25.

In that article I stated that, "Figuring at 25.8 grains to the dollar and 4,900 grains to the cubic inch, eight billion dollars of gold would be contained in a sixty-foot cube."

I confess with mortification that I made a miscalculation. A sixty-foot cube of gold would contain about seventy billion gold dollars weighing 25.8 grains each.

The world's present supply of coin and bar gold, estimated at about eight billion dollars, would be contained in a twenty-nine-foot cube. The exact calculation is as follows:

A gold dollar contains 25.8 grains of gold, Troy weight.

A cubic inch of gold contains about 4,900 grains, or $190.

There are 1,728 cubic inches to a cubic foot. A cubic foot of gold would therefore contain $328,320 worth of the metal.

A twenty-nine foot cube contains 24,389 cubic feet, multiplied by $328,320 makes $8,007,396,480, which is about the equivalent of the world's estimated supply of gold coin and bars at present.

I am more than glad to make the correction, although it is not important except as emphasizing the infinitesimally small basis upon which the world's credit structure is superimposed.

In his kindly letter calling attention to my mistake, Mr. Tallmadge quotes the following epigram which he attributes to Justice Brandeis, and of the truth of which I am more than ever convinced :

"Arithmetic is the first of the sciences and the Mother of Safety." New York City.

THEODORE H. PRICE.

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THE PRODUCER AND THE DISTRIBUTER As Mr. Thistleton in his article on My Neighbor's Cherries, and Some Problems" (The Outlook for September 27, 1916) says that he does not know why the retail grocery stores are here, I would like to inform him that they are here because there are very few people in the United States who do not either directly or indirectly require their services. He thinks that because milk is distributed regularly and promptly other farm produce could be. Efficient distribution requires a uniform supply and demand, while with farm produce surplus and shortage follow each other frequently. The demand is also very irregular. The system used in the distribution of milk will therefore not work with other farm produce. In regard to daily express trains for shipment of farm produce, if the existing express companies could be guaranteed five or ten car-loads a day to be delivered at central points they could handle the business more cheaply than could be done by the fantastic, imaginary system proposed by Mr. Thistleton. It is doubtless true that if peo ple would mail their orders the day before the goods were required prices would be reduced twenty-five per cent. It is also true that if they would carry their goods home another important reduction in prices could be made.

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