It was, in fact, settled by Mr. Justice Stephen in 1880, who declared that the telephone was a telegraph within the meaning of the Telegraph Acts, 1863, 1869, although the telephone was not invented or contemplated in 1869. In this way its proper development in this country was arrested for more than a generation. This is a remarkable instance of judge-made law. Why should an individual citizen just as unversed in science and business as the man in the street have the right to enact what should or should not be done with an entirely new invention which was not in existence when the statute which he pretends to apply was enacted. If the judges decided that an aeroplane plying for hire was a hackney carriage it would in law remain liable to all the statutory hackneydom of carriages until Parliament otherwise ordained. Is it not becoming time when judges, instead of making new and often reckless law, should be satisfied with declaring that in the case before them there is no law to their knowledge, and it is for the Legislature to consider and enact some. If this had been Mr. Justice Stephen's decision in _The Attorney-General v. The Edison Telephone Co. of London, Ltd._, how much better for all of us to-day! Again, in the Workmen's Compensation Act, Parliament, it is known, intended and desired to express many things which the judicial interpretations of the Act have altered and amended out of all recognition. It is scarcely true that these interpretations are all of them due to the verbal inaccuracy of the parliamentary draftsman, because one often finds the Court of Appeal taking one view of the meaning of the words and the House of Lords another. The real parliamentary object of the Act is now very difficult to understand and ascertain from the language used in the judgments interpreting it. If law were really a science and the interpretations of statutes by judges merely an ascertaining of parliamentary intention, one would not expect to find such different interpretations put upon the same words and the parliamentary intention so openly ignored. In America grave popular discontent has arisen over the law-making propensities of judges and their bold refusal to carry out the intentions of the Legislature. We have no such widespread feeling in this country, nor are we likely to have, but, all the same, if we were to recognise the law-making power of our judges and openly discuss it and endeavour to define and limit it, there would be less fear in the future of a rupture between the people and the judges when futurist laws of far-reaching social reform come to be administered by the Courts. The lamentable failure of consistent interpretations of the Compensation Acts is not calculated to raise the judiciary in the affections and respect of the working classes.