Our present system, or rather no system, works dreadful wrong, and is of benefit to only one class of people—­the lawyers.  When a workman is injured what he needs is not an expensive and doubtful lawsuit, but the certainty of relief through immediate administrative action.  The number of accidents which result in the death or crippling of wageworkers, in the Union at large, is simply appalling; in a very few years it runs up a total far in excess of the aggregate of the dead and wounded in any modern war.  No academic theory about “freedom of contract” or “constitutional liberty to contract” should be permitted to interfere with this and similar movements.  Progress in civilization has everywhere meant a limitation and regulation of contract.  I call your especial attention to the bulletin of the Bureau of Labor which gives a statement of the methods of treating the unemployed in European countries, as this is a subject which in Germany, for instance, is treated in connection with making provision for worn-out and crippled workmen.

Pending a thoroughgoing investigation and action there is certain legislation which should be enacted at once.  The law, passed at the last session of the Congress, granting compensation to certain classes of employees of the Government, should be extended to include all employees of the Government and should be made more liberal in its terms.  There is no good ground for the distinction made in the law between those engaged in hazardous occupations and those not so engaged.  If a man is injured or killed in any line of work, it was hazardous in his case.  Whether 1 per cent or 10 per cent of those following a given occupation actually suffer injury or death ought not to have any bearing on the question of their receiving compensation.  It is a grim logic which says to an injured employee or to the dependents of one killed that he or they are entitled to no compensation because very few people other than he have been injured or killed in that occupation.  Perhaps one of the most striking omissions in the law is that it does not embrace peace officers and others whose lives may be sacrificed in enforcing the laws of the United States.  The terms of the act providing compensation should be made more liberal than in the present act.  A year’s compensation is not adequate for a wage-earner’s family in the event of his death by accident in the course of his employment.  And in the event of death occurring, say, ten or eleven months after the accident, the family would only receive as compensation the equivalent of one or two months’ earnings.  In this respect the generosity of the United States towards its employees compares most unfavorably with that of every country in Europe—­even the poorest.