When you have an Act of Parliament that in at least a dozen reported cases is solemnly decided to mean _x_ in the Court of Appeal and _y_ in the House of Lords, _x_ representing "against the workman" and _y_ "for the workman," what does the man in the street think about it? And yet I cannot believe there is so much difficulty about construing the Act if the Courts would all steer by those excellent sailing directions of Lord Halsbury and Lord Davey. Lord Halsbury said: "The broad proposition, of course, was that the Legislature intended that there should be compensation given to every workman in certain trades when an injury happened to him in the course of his employment." Lord Davey said: "I entirely agree with what has been said by my noble and learned friend on the Woolsack that you ought to construe this Act so as, as far as possible, to give effect to the primary provisions of it." Now the primary provision of the Act was to compensate workmen for injuries, not to leave them uncompensated, and to do the business promptly and simply. We want more of the spirit of the Act and less of the letter, and a great deal fewer forms and orders and rules. In a word, more business and less procedure. As a dear old lady said to me when, after several efforts to set her affairs right, the registrar and myself had at last got her to fill up the papers necessary, as things are now, to get her case through: "I tell you candidly, Judge, all this filling up of papers and signing things has been more worry to me than the loss of my old man." And I'm sure she loved her old man--so what must she have thought of us and our Act of Parliament? There may be some who think that it is almost indelicate to discuss such a subject as the possible fallibility of the higher judiciary. I agree that it is a subject that can only be treated by one imbued with that reverence for existing institutions that so happily results from a sane middle-class education. Moreover, we cannot shut our ears to the sound of much discussion about what is called judicial bias by the man in the street. In America the sounds are louder and clearer than they are in England, and the problem is so much the simpler to understand--especially for the onlooker. There are great lessons for us to study if we would avoid the troubles which the American judges have been assiduously looking for and are now successfully finding. Two interesting books written from different standpoints, Gilbert E. Roe's "Our Judicial Oligarchy," 1912, and Frederick N. Judson's "The Judiciary and the People," 1913, show the eagerness with which lawyers who have human interests outside the daily problems of their profession are discussing the great questions of the law and the poor.