Lord Abinger, C.B., who presided in the Appeal Court, admitted that there were no precedents either for or against such an action, but he was hard put to it to explain in legal terms why the little butcher's boy, who was certainly a brave explorer into legal hinterlands, was not to be allowed to peg out the claim the jury had awarded him. His Lordship was driven back to "general principles." The most learned lawyer of our day, the late Mr. Danckwerts, once said to me when I was a very young man at the Bar and talked glibly in consultation about the "broad grounds of truth and justice": "If we have nothing better to rest our case on than that, God help us in the Court of Appeal." He then proceeded to show me some cases on the subject which my ignorance and inexperience had failed to discover. And it was not that the great man was not a lover of truth and justice, but that he knew that law meant, not what he and I and our client thought to be truth and justice, but what all generations of calm thinking men outside the dispute ought to think to be truth and justice, and that was to be found in the decisions in similar cases which he knew as no other lawyer ever did and about which I showed the common ignorance of my contemporaries. Lord Abinger, then, having no cases to guide him, played a lone hand, and naturally played it from the point of view of the man who held the cards. If, he said, the master be liable to the servant in an action of this kind the principle of the liability would carry us to an alarming extent. For instance, if a master put a servant into a damp bed or a crazy bedstead or gave him bad meat to eat he might be liable in damages to his servant. "The inconvenience, not to say the absurdity, of these consequences," afforded a sufficient argument against poor Priestley and all other servants in like case. Priestley broke his leg and lost his case, and legal history does not record his future career. But, though Lord Abinger was against him, he might fairly have said in the phrase of a celebrated and eloquent Manchester surgeon that, "This day he had lighted a candle which would bring forth good fruit." Several minor heroes made legal efforts to get behind this judgment, but the judges were too many for them. It was strongly endeavoured to make masters liable to their servants for injury caused by the negligence of a fellow servant, but the judges declared that, when a servant enters a service he contemplates all the ordinary risks of his work, including the negligence of his fellow servants, and that allowance is made for this by the master in fixing his wages. This "doctrine of common employment," as it was called, was, of course, largely a figment of judicial imagination, and it set back, or rather kept back, the hour of industrial reform for more than one generation.