“Was there no agreement between you?” I asked.
“Well, we did agree about one thing.”
“And what was that?” I asked hopefully.
“We agreed that if we couldn’t settle what I ought to pay,” he replied, eyeing me with doubt and disapprobation, “that we should leave it to a respectable man.”
Now what he really wanted was a judge full of bucolic bias and well acquainted with vaccine and equine learning. It was only I fancy in a veterinary sense that he considered that I was not respectable.
And nowadays when we open the Courts to new applicants, and turn over great schemes of workmen’s compensation to judges to deal with, we want judges to work them who are in touch with the needs and lives of the working class, not necessarily folk who want to exalt the poor on to unreal pedestals and clothe them with impossible virtues, but people who know how near their faults and virtues are to those of the rest of mankind.
And when we find American judges deciding that no system of workmen’s compensation is to be allowed to become law, and when we note that the most learned judges of our own Appeal Courts differ constantly as to the meaning of the words of our own scheme, thereby causing delay, confusion and expense, it raises a question in one’s mind as to whether some far less exalted Court of Appeal—say, three County Court judges who have to try these cases face to face with the men and women who are interested in their decision—would not better meet the wants of the community in carrying out the scheme and come nearer to the ideal of “the respectable man.” A bishop has once been a curate, but a Lord Justice of Appeal has never been a County Court judge. The Workmen’s Compensation Act is a practical business machine of a complicated character, and it is scarcely a sensible thing that the men who have to keep it going should work under the theoretical direction of men who have never seen it working.
And there is another reason why the appeals in these cases should be removed from the Court of Appeal, and that is a very practical one—the Court is over-crowded and has no time to try them. Even now as I write there are cases, many of them perhaps merely questions of the payment of a few shillings a week, which have been waiting for many months to be reached. From the point of view of everyone concerned, except the lawyer, there is no health in this litigation. In so far as the administration of the Workmen’s Compensation Act has been a success it has been because insurance companies and employers and trade unions and workmen have either kept out of Court altogether or, when they have got there, have assisted the registrars and judges of the County Court to work the thing on business lines and have resisted in a large measure the temptation in the uncertainty of the decisions to speculative litigation. There is still enough English common-sense left among us to muddle through most things, but the Workmen’s Compensation Act, as interpreted in the Court of Appeal, has tried it fairly high.