This matter is really one of grave importance, for though in a sense and up to a point, whatever a judge decrees is for the time the law--that time may only be short. In the end the law must express the wills of those who rule society. Professor Vinogradoff well says, in that excellent little treatise "Common Sense in Law," we ought to "realise that law has to be considered not merely from the point of view of its enforcement by the Courts: it depends ultimately on _recognition_." When, then, we openly confess that our judges are making new law every day we shall have to impress on them--especially in social matters--that the new law they make should be, like new parliamentary law, founded on the best aspirations of modern hopes and thoughts of the future life of our people, rather than on the musty creeds and traditions in which the individual human beings who are judges have unfortunately for the most part been educated. Judge-made law, like any other law, can only be of value to the community by popular recognition of its wisdom. The more the judges can keep to the real administration and interpretation of laws already existing the better for everyone, but new points of difference and a new social order of things naturally bring before the judges cases which can only be decided by their making new laws. When it is freely acknowledged that this is so, not only the community but the judges themselves will be called upon to consider and decide the ideals and principles by which they ought to be actuated in their capacity of lawgivers. The law that was laid down to meet the case of the butcher and his boy became the law under which every railway servant, every miner, every mechanic, every navvy--the huge industrial army working under impersonal boards and committees of limited liability companies--risked his life in his daily work at his own expense. From 1836 to 1880 men were killed and injured by the thousands in industrial work and there were no pensions for the widows and orphans, no compensation for the wounded. Moreover, such a system discouraged employers from spending money on safety devices. No doubt many good and wise employers did a great deal to safeguard their men; equally no doubt, servants, being but human, were often injured and killed by their own carelessness and recklessness. The deplorable part of it was that the law had taken up an attitude against the poor in this matter and, as things stood, it was to no company's interest to spend their money and decrease their dividends by safeguarding the lives and limbs of their servants. This is still so in America, where on the railroads one man is killed for every two hundred and five employed and one is injured in every nine. "War is safe compared to railroading in this country," is the comment of Mr. Gilbert Roe, the American jurist. Of course, at all times much was done by private charity of employers and others to help those who fell in the industrial fight.