There never really was a law of that kind. It is what is rightly called judge-made law. The judges said that it was "inconvenient" and "absurd" for masters to be responsible for negligence of their servants. So, of course, it was--to the masters and in 1836 that finished the matter. Thus it came about that in a railway accident, if it was caused, let us say, through the negligence of the company's signalman, every ordinary passenger got compensation out of the company, but the engine driver, the stoker, the guard, and their widows and orphans got nothing. Note, however, that if the signalman had belonged to another company it would have been quite otherwise. In the old days when Druids sat under oak trees I daresay judge-made law was all very well, though no doubt the personal prejudices of the Druids were manifest in their decisions. But since the days of the Ten Commandments it has been recognised that statute law, carefully considered and simply expressed and written down on tables of stone or otherwise, is a better-class article for ordering the affairs of a modern community. No doubt the judges of 1836, being men connected with the upper middle classes of the day, could not conceive how civilisation and social order could exist side by side with a wicked system whereby a master had to compensate a workman injured in his service. The thing was as incomprehensible to the judicial mind of that date as the fifth proposition of Euclid is to many a third-form schoolboy to-day. Some of our judges are still in the third form in their ideas of sociology. That is one of the dangers of judge-made law. It is bound to put the stamp of old-fashioned class prejudice on its judgments. If the judges had been labour leaders they would have discovered an implied contract for the master to pay compensation with equal complacency. The fact is that _natural justice_ is merely justice according to the length of the judge's foot, as the common saying is. And the length of a judicial foot will depend on the evolution of the judge. That is to say, according as he and his ancestors have rested their feet cramped in pinched shoes under the mahogany of the wealthy or tramped barefoot along the highway in the freedom of poverty, so will a judge's principles of natural justice favour the rich or the poor. We cannot get away from the fact that our judges make a great deal of law. The idea that a law is somewhere in existence and that the judges merely adopt it will not, I think, hold good for a moment. It is, indeed, a legal fiction. As a great American jurist, Professor John Chipman Gray, of Harvard, asks: "What was the law in the time of Richard Coeur de Lion on the liability of a telegraph company to the persons to whom a message was sent?" The answer to this question is obvious.