It must be admitted that even our discredited system of employers' liability has afforded occasional relief to the victims of accidents. But even this uncertain and irregular protection, poor as it is, has in most instances been denied to workers exposed to the creeping horror of industrial disease. The exact occupational cause of the affliction is, of course, more difficult to prove. The employee is thus placed at still greater disadvantage in dealing with his employer. American judges, basing their opinions on outgrown decisions of the British House of Lords, have declared that "industrial injuries" include only those afflictions of an accidental nature whose cause can be ascribed to a definite point of time, and have thus almost universally barred even from the occasional and expensive relief of employers' liability the victims of such typical maladies as the match maker's "phossy jaw," the lead worker's "wrist-drop" and painter's colic, the boiler maker's deafness, the glass worker's cataract, the potter's palsy, the hatter's shakes, and the compressed air worker's bends. The public has not yet forgotten pitiful cases where match manufacturers, through the work of their attorneys, were able to deny all financial relief to their victims of "phossy jaw." And there are cases now pending in the courts where men totally blinded by the fumes of wood alcohol have year after year sued in vain for some financial relief from brewery companies which employed them to varnish the inside of beer vats. Occasionally, however, large awards have been made. But they, as in the case of damage suits arising out of accidents, encourage further expensive litigation. One case of wood alcohol poisoning in Ohio (Joseph Frank _vs._ The Herancourt Brewing Co., 82 O. S., 424) is now a matter of record. The Supreme Court compelled the employer to pay $12,500, with interest and costs, aggregating over $15,000. "After five years of litigation, six hearings in three different courts, including two trips to the Supreme Court, printing of several thousand pages of record testimony and briefs, taking voluminous depositions in different parts of the country involving great expense, during which the injured workman--in this instance rendered blind--was totally unable to support his wife and family, the wife being obliged to work at nights in downtown cafes, scrubbing floors after midnight, in order to provide scant food for herself and babies while the latter slept." This verdict is of peculiar interest, according to the well-known Cincinnati law firm which prosecuted the case, because it is the first instance so far as they have been able to ascertain in which there has been a recovery from injuries resulting from the poisonous influence of wood alcohol.