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 chiefly had men's views confided to me
privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of
commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something.
They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so