Judge Taft, in a case in which this same reasoning was advanced, and in which the decision of this New York Court of Appeals was cited as an authority, refused to follow it and rendered a decision which leaves full vitality to protective legislation. The case was one in which a railroad company had failed to obey the law which required it to fill or block frogs and furnish guard rails on their tracks. The plaintiff, a railway employee, kept at work, knowing that the frogs were not blocked, and was hurt through the absence of the protection which the statute required the railroad to furnish him. He had a verdict from the jury, the railroad appealed, and its lawyer, Judson Harmon, argued that the verdict should be set aside because the man had kept at work knowing the railroad's violation of the law, and had therefore by legal implication contracted with the railroad to take all the chances of being hurt. Judge Taft refused to follow the New York case, declaring:
The only ground for passing such a statute is found in the inequality of terms upon which the railroad company and its servants deal in regard to the dangers of their employment. The manifest legislative purpose was to protect the servant by positive law, because he had not previously shown himself capable of protecting himself by contract, and it would entirely defeat its purpose thus to permit the servant to contract the master out of the statute.
This case has been cited all over the United States by counsel for workmen injured through the failure of their employers to furnish the protection required by statute for their safety. Perhaps a majority of the State courts follow the New York case, and say that protective legislation intended for the benefit of working men at work is of no legal value to them if they stay at work. The legal theory on which the workman assumes the risks of personal injury need not here be discussed. Judge Taft, however, decided that when a law is made applying to a dangerous business, in which four thousand men are killed and sixty-five thousand are injured every year, the intention was that the railroads should obey that law, and it should not be nullified "by construction." In this conclusion he does not lack judicial support of high character.
This, in substance, is Taft's labor record so far as his judicial career is concerned. Its consideration by the general public can be useful but for one purpose, which is this: A country like ours cannot afford to elect a class president. It cannot afford to elect a president in whose mind the distinction between lawlessness and personal rights is not clear and distinct; who to please one class will weaken the foundations of the liberty and peace of a whole nation. It can still less afford to elect a president to whom the working people are but pawns on the chessboard, and to whom prosperity means peace at any price by the sacrifice of the rights of the working people, so long as the mills are at work and property is secure in the possessions which it has somehow acquired. The enemies of our democracy are at both extremes.
The Socialists attacked Roosevelt with greater bitterness than any president who had preceded him, because he had not been a class president, and because he had not ignored the interests and rights of the working people and thereby helped still further to increase the constantly growing "class-conscious" body of dissatisfied men marching under the Socialists' banner. That section of the press which supports lawless property has attacked him because he has disturbed "values" and "vested interests." There is no sure protection for property but justice. Suppression of the labor organizations will not insure it; they should not and cannot be suppressed. Nor is there on the other hand any protection for the public if at the demands of a class, no matter how large its voting strength, the peace of the whole country is to be jeopardized by weakening the foundations of law which impose just limitations on industrial warfare. We need for president a man who will recognize and protect the just rights of both rich and poor and thereby protect American democracy against its class enemies. By these standards Mr. Taft must be judged.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Documents throwing light upon the action of Admiral Alexeieff will be found at the end of General Kuropatkin's historical narrative, although they are not a part thereof. These documents will also explain the important part that State Councillor Bezobrazoff played in the Far East, and indicate the source of his extraordinary power.
[2] A town on the road from Mukden and Liao-yang to the mouth of the Yalu River in northern Korea.
[3] Mounted Manchurian bandits.
[4] The Russian minister in China.
[5] The Russian minister in Korea.
[6] The documents at the end of General Kuropatkin's narrative will explain why an officer as powerful even as the Minister of War might be supposed to fear Bezobrazoff—a retired official of the civil service who, personally, had no importance whatever.
[7] In June, 1903, there was a good deal of friction between the employees of the Bezobrazoff company and those of a Japanese-Chinese syndicate which had obtained from the Korean Government, in March, a timber concession in this same region. Two Chinese were shot by the Russians, and the rafts of the syndicate were seized. Balasheff's dispatch probably referred to this or some similar incident, and the Captain Bodisco to whom it was addressed was probably an officer in the service of the Bezobrazoff company on the Yalu.—G. K.
[8] "Osvobozhdenie," No. 75, Stuttgart, August 19, N. S., 1905. No question has ever been raised, I think, with regard to the authenticity of these letters and telegrams; but if there were any doubt of it, such doubt would be removed by a comparison of them with General Kuropatkin's history.—G. K.
[9] Asakawa, who seems to have investigated this matter carefully, says that the original contract for this concession dated as far back as August 26, 1896, when the Korean king was living in the Russian legation at Seoul as a refugee.—"The Russo-Japanese Conflict," by K. Asakawa, London, 1905, p. 289.
[10] The italics are my own.—G. K.
[11] Since I wrote this, a friend has supplied the quotation, but as I know no Latin, less Greek, and the least possible amount of bad French, I cannot answer for its correctness! "Quamquam ridentem dicere verum quid vetat?"
[12] The Ford of Weeping.