are set aside “as subordinate to the primary question whether they can be molded into statutes without infringing upon the letter or spirit of our own written Constitution.”  The countries which have adopted this desirable reform, it is said, “are so-called constitutional monarchies in which, as in England, there is no written constitution, and the Parliament or lawmaking body is supreme.  In our country the Federal and State Constitutions are the charters which demark the extent and the limitation of legislative power.”

In brief:  The change in the law is just:  it is demanded by the change which has taken place in our industrial system; it is all but universally desired; the experience and the conscience of the civilized world call for it; but America is powerless to make it under her present Constitution.  Other countries can make it because they are monarchies:  America cannot make it because she is free.

The clause in the Constitution which, in the opinion of the Court of Appeals, prohibits the legislature from making this wise and just reform in our law is the clause which provides that “no person shall be ... deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law”—­a prohibition which occurs twice in our Federal Constitution (Amendments V and XIV), and is to be found in many, very probably in most, State Constitutions.  We believe that the Court of Appeals, in its contention that this clause in our Constitution prohibits this just and necessary reform in our industrial laws, is sustained neither by the spirit nor by the letter of this clause in the Constitution, neither by the history of its origin and significance nor by the course of judicial interpretation which has been given to it by the United Slates Supreme Court.

Let the reader stop a moment here and reflect upon the principle involved in the law enacted in other civilized countries and proposed in ours.  It is not that an employer should be mulcted in damages when he has been guilty of no fault.  It is not that he should be compelled to pay for his carelessness without an opportunity to prove to the court that he has not been careless.  It is that accidents occurring in the course of organized industry should be held to have occurred, not to the individual, but to the industry.

“In everything within the sphere of human activity,” says the Court of Appeals, “the risks which are inherent and unavoidable must fall upon those who are exposed to them.”  The jurists of all the civilized countries of Europe agree that in modern organized industries it is the industry, not the individual, that is exposed to the accidents.  The law applies to the factory hand for the future the principle heretofore applied to the seaman in maritime law.  The factory hand is henceforth to be regarded as a “co-adventurer” with the employer in the industry.