(5) Finally, the callousness to injuries incurred by employees must be sharply checked.  Well over a hundred thousand men, women, and children are killed or injured every year in the various industries of this country.  Our proportion of accidents is far greater than in Europe; the great majority are preventable by the adoption of known safeguards.  What stands in the way is, partly, ignorance and heedlessness on the part of employers, and, still more, the initial cost of installing safety appliances.  It is often cheaper to lose an occasional damage suit than to forestall accidents.  In coal mines alone we have let thirty thousand men be killed and seventy-five thousand be more or less seriously maimed, in a decade; proportionately about twice as many as in European mines-which are far from ideally safeguarded.  There are two ways to check this waste and crippling of human life; one is to keep our legislation up to date, and require the installation of every effective safety device, no matter if the cost to the public has to be increased.  The other is to make accidents so expensive to employers that they will have a greater interest in taking measures to prevent them.

Certainly all deaths or injuries in any industry where proper precautions have been neglected must be a criminal matter for the employer. [Footnote:  Outlook, vol. 92, p. 171; vol. 93, p. 196; vol. 99, p. 202.  World’s Work, vol. 22, p. 13602; vol. 23, p. 713.] We must do entirely away with the system whereby accidents to workingmen bear so heavily upon their families.  Though it is true that they are commonly due, in some measure, to the carelessness of the worker, his punishment, in the loss of life or limb, is great enough; and if he dies or is incapacitated from supporting wife and children, the burden should fall upon the community, which is able to bear it.  It should not be necessary to bring a damage suit against the employer; that method is slow, dubious, and expensive; the corporation, with its expert lawyers, has too great an advantage over the helpless and sorrow-struck poor.  In some form, automatic compensation for injuries is destined to become universal; the cost will fall upon the industry, where it belongs, bad feeling between employer and employee will cease, the courts will be freed from a good deal of work, and relief will follow injury with promptness and certainty. [Footnote:  H. R. Seager, Social Insurance.  Outlook, vol. 85, p. 508; vol. 92, p. 319; vol. 98, p. 49.  S. Nearing, Social Adjustment, chap.  XII.] What general remedies for industrial wrongs are feasible?