the butcher, painter, carpenter, or blacksmith and his workmen. In all these cases it is, it seems to us, as true on principle to-day as it was half a century ago that the master is not bound to take more care of his servant than he may be reasonably expected to take of himself, and that a servant has better opportunities than his master of watching and guarding against the conduct and preventing the negligence of his fellow-servant. It is as true now as it ever was that, so long as liability is based on the theory or principle of negligence, a servant ought, generally speaking, to be held to assume the ordinary and obvious risks of the employment upon which he enters and for which he presumably stipulates for adequate and satisfactory compensation. Likewise, in the majority of cases, it is as true to-day as it ever was that the servant who has been guilty of contributory negligence should not be allowed to charge his master with responsibility for the injury. The reasoning of the judges establishing and maintaining these doctrines at the common law has never been refuted. Nevertheless, they are mere rules of law, subject to change, not by the judiciary, but by the legislature; and, in the opinion of the writer, there is no provision in the state or national constitution which would prevent their abrogation if this were deemed necessary or desirable by a legislative body. But modern industrialism, the development of machinery, the employment of large numbers of men and women in crowded factories, and work in connection with dangerous instrumentalities of manufacture and transportation, etc., have changed conditions, so that what is still true of the farm, the household, the small artisan, the carpenter, the painter, the butcher, the grocer, etc., is not true of the busy hives of manufacture, of transportation by steam or electricity, or of other hazardous industries. The increase in accidents, the apparent certainty that many casualties are inevitable, the recklessness engendered by the modern struggle for existence, the increasing difficulty in many employments of measuring degrees of fault, the pressing necessities and improvidence of the poor: these and other considerations well warrant the interposition of the legislature as the lawmaking power of the state, in order to make changes in the law--changes which the courts should not attempt to make, for their duty or function is not to legislate but to declare what the law has been or now is. Instead, then, of abusing the courts, how much wiser and more decorous would it be for labor organizations, labor leaders, or social reformers to petition the legislature to amend the law, and to abandon the attempt to intimidate and coerce the judiciary into making the desired change. One of our correspondents speaks of "the venomous fellow-servant doctrine." Yet the responsibility for the continuance of that doctrine, if it has become undesirable in any employment or in all employments,