An average man, not overlearned in political science, and not too well acquainted with the ways and means of politicians, might naturally suppose that the result of something more than 1639 “labor” laws would be an almost revolutionary change in the conditions of industry. He might suppose a general effect comprising these particulars: the securing of safe places and safe conditions for toil; the utmost safeguarding against accidents; the fixing of liability for injuries or death suffered in the service of a master; the guarantee of the right of workmen to combine, to leave their work for causes sufficient to themselves, and peaceably to persuade others to do so; the guarantee of protection from blacklisting by employers, and the framing of all such laws in a spirit so sincere and in diction so definite that judicial discretion would be reduced to a minimum.
“Labor” legislation, however, takes on too much a form and pressure due to influences from above to confirm even this temperate supposition. It is somewhat presumptuous, and in a later time will be grossly impious, for a layman not of the seigniorial class to speak querulously on so sacred a subject; yet it needs must be said that the mass of the measures so far framed have proceeded but little beyond the confines of the common law. Many of them, indeed, are mere enactments into statute of that elastic, not to say elusive, body of precedent. The common law comes down to us from distant times, when other conditions prevailed, and throughout all of it which bears on the relations of master and servant there runs a principle based on an unsupported theory. “This theory,” writes Mr. George W. Alger, a member of the New York Bar, in the _American Journal of Sociology_ for November, 1900, “resolutely closed its eyes to common, obvious, social and economic distinctions between men, either considered as individuals or as classes, and with a self-imposed blindness imagined rather than saw the servant and his master acting upon a plane of absolute and ideal equality in all matters touching their contractual relation; both were free and equal, and the proper function of government was to let them alone. If the servant was dissatisfied with the conditions of his employment; if the dangers created not merely by the necessities of the work, but by the master’s indifference to the safety of his men, were in the eyes of the latter too great to be endured with prudence, then, being under this theory a ‘free agent’ to go or to stay, if he chose to stay he must take the possible consequences of personal injury or death.”