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even greater increase is found. During the present year 4,382 complaints of this character were filed with the Commission, as against 503 in the year 1905, and 1,002 in the year 1906, showing an increase of more than 400 per cent over the preceding year. It is found impracticable to give a more detailed statement of these informal proceedings in this report, but it may safely be stated that they allege violations of every section of the law.

During the year informal reparation claims were awarded to injured shippers by the Commission in 561 cases, aggregating about $104,700. A synopsis of these cases appears in Appendix F of this report, which shows the causes for which the money damages were allowed. About 200 reparation claims were denied. So important has this branch of the work become that it has recently been made a special division and transferred to the Division of Statistics and Accounts.

In the matter of the correspondence of the Commission this steady yearly increase is still further manifested. During the year 1905 the Commission received 23,720 letters and in 1906, 29,966 letters, while during the present year 66,933 letters were received, briefed, filed, and answered, averaging more than 218 letters for each working day in the year. This statement relates entirely to the operating branch of the Commission.

The increased power vested in the Commission by the recent amendments to the act has naturally led to the multiplication of the number of complaints presented by letter, and these complaints relate to every conceivable subject connected with the rates, methods, practices, and service of interstate carriers.

A fair conception of the work performed by the Commission in the field of regulation is not possible without reference to the results attained in respect to these cases in which formal complaint is not filed, nor proceedings of a formal nature pursued by the complainant. The public is not advised of the full extent of the work accomplished in securing, through correspondence, the voluntary adjustment by carriers of questions in dispute relating to interstate transportation, nor is the public cognizant of the extreme importance and value of the results attained.

Through the medium of correspondence is secured the settlement of many matters extremely vexatious to shippers. The questions thus amicably adjusted are not alone questions affecting the interest of individuals; on the contrary, the effect of the action taken by carriers in the adjustment of these complaints is often of widespread interest and advantage to large communities, if not indeed of vital importance to considerable sections of country. Controversies arising out of the relations between the carriers themselves are likewise, in many instances, presented to the Commission for arbitration. The Commission is also called upon frequently by traffic officials of carriers to indicate what is

considered to be the proper and lawful course to be pursued in respect to the application of rates or regulations affecting transportation. Thus it will be seen that many great benefits result from the adjustment or settlement through correspondence of questions informally submitted for investigation.

The traffic officials of the carriers have manifested to a commendable degree a disposition and willingness to fairly and carefully consider the merits of complaints thus called to their attention by the Commission, and have voluntarily reduced their rates and applied corrective measures in numerous cases.

Naturally many of the informal complaints presented, while involving grievances growing out of conditions related to interstate transportation, are yet not within the purview of the provisions of the statute or the jurisdiction of the Commission. Of the total number of complaints filed almost one-half were cases of this nature. In approximately 2,500 cases the informal complaint made had relation to matters within the jurisdiction of the Commission, and in nearly 1,400 cases relief has been secured and amicable adjustment effected through correspondence, without the necessity or expense of formal proceedings. In respect to 600 of these cases, including those in which special reparation orders were granted upon submission of claims to the Commission by the consignee, consignor, or by the carriers themselves, the remedy thus applied by the carriers involved the reduction of rates.

The adjustment of more than 600 cases, including those claims in respect to which authority was granted to carriers to make special reparation, resulted in refund to shippers of a portion of the charges previously collected. Relief has also been secured through the intervention of the Commission in respect to many other miscellaneous matters, among which may be specially mentioned the securing of improved service in cases where shippers complained of being subjected to inconvenience and loss owing to the failure or refusal of carriers to furnish equipment for the transportation of their commodities; also through expediting the settlement of claims filed against railroad companies in cases where unreasonable delay in making final disposition is charged. The carriers declined to take action for the removal of the cause of complaint in 875 cases, basing their refusal upon the contention that the rates or practices in regard to which complaint related were just and reasonable. Quite a large number of the informal complaints filed during the year are still pending, awaiting further information or advice from the complainant or action by the carrier.

Two hundred and seventy-six hearings and investigations of alleged violations of the act to regulate commerce, including several investigations under joint resolutions of Congress, have been had at general sessions of the Commission at its office in Washington and at special sessions held in New York, and other cities throughout the United States.

THE EMPLOYERS' LIABILITY BILL1

WASHINGTON, April 10. — By far the most important bill of the present session of Congress has passed the two houses, with only one dissenting vote recorded against it. Political exigencies demanded that the Republicans enact an employers' liability law to replace the one recently shattered by a Supreme Court decision. The terms and provisions of the law were, in a manner of speaking, unimportant. The main thing was to enact a law which could bear the title of an employers' liability

measure.

Therefore, it has come to pass that the measure of largest general consequence passed by Congress at this session, affecting thousands of people, was enacted after forty minutes of restricted discussion in the House, and a brief afternoon of superficial and perfunctory debate in the Senate. Many of the able lawyers in both branches of Congress believe the act will not stand the test of the Supreme Court. If an employers' liability law is finally to take its place on the statute book, they believe, all of the work will have to be done over again. Indeed, so widely prevalent is this belief that the bill, which has been sent to the President for its approval, is in several of its features so clearly unconstitutional that in the House Mr. Parker of New Jersey, Mr. Payne of New York, Mr. Keifer of Ohio, openly said as much. Nevertheless, they voted for the bill, leaving Mr. Littlefield of Maine the sole dissenter in either branch against the bill.

The conditions in the Senate, under which the bill was hurriedly passed yesterday afternoon, caused Senator Teller to make earnest protest. Senator Teller was not the only person who confessed to a lack of information about the bill. Many Senators said privately yesterday afternoon that they had not even read the House bill, which the Senate passed without amendment. It is absurd on the face of it that there should be unanimous agreement in both Houses of Congress on a bill involving important Constitutional questions. In so small a body as the Supreme Court, the proverbial division of the justices is five to four on all cases involving grave Constitutional problems. This was the division on the previously enacted employers' liability law.

The Senate's hasty action yesterday afternoon came as a surprise. It is no uncommon thing for the members of the House to follow, sheep-like, in a trail blazed for them by their so-called leaders. Observers of legislation in Washington have become accustomed to seeing the House passing up undigested legislation to be properly whipped into shape after thorough and intelligent discussion in the Senate. It is also no uncommon sight to see one of the great annual appropriation bills authorizing an expenditure of $20,000,000 or more yawned through the

1 The New York Evening Post, April 10, 1908.

Senate on a dreary afternoon, and practically without debate. But it does cause comment and surprise when a bill involving Constitutional rights is rattled through the Senate without deliberation and without any debate worthy of the name.

Senator Knox was so confident that the employers' liability law, which recently failed to meet the Supreme Court test, was unconstitutional, that, before the court had handed down its decision, he had ready for introduction in the Senate another measure intended to meet the objections which he felt sure the court would raise. He precisely foreshadowed the court's decision, and immediately introduced his bill. This is the measure that Senator Teller referred to as "the Senate bill."

On January 6 last the Supreme Court declared the previously enacted employers' liability act unconstitutional upon the one main ground that it undertook to apply its provisions to all common carriers engaged in interstate commerce, regardless of the fact that injuries may often happen to employees of such carriers who are not at the time of the injury engaged in forwarding interstate commerce. The decision, in which the court was divided — four to five-held that the failure of Congress to separate the employees who are engaged in interstate commerce at the time of the injury from the mass of the employees of the common carrier, was sufficient to destroy the validity of the act.

Senator Dolliver, in explaining the enactment which now awaits the approval of the President, asserted that it contained four substantive propositions, which he outlined.

First, it modifies the old law of the negligence of coemployees. The old law, which took root in the United States two generations ago, was to the effect that an employee injured by the negligence of a fellow-workman could not recover. This bill abolishes that doctrine, and gives the employee the right to recover for injuries arising from the negligence of his fellow-workman.

The second proposition modifies the law whereby, in other generations, workmen were held by the court to assume the risks arising from defective machinery.

In the third place, the present enactment modifies radically the law of contributory negligence. As administered by our courts it has been uniformly held that an employee suffering an injury to which his own negligence contributed can not, by reason of that participation in the injury, have any recovery at law. This act liberalizes that doctrine of the law. It is based upon the theory that where an injury occurs partly by reason of the negligence of the employer and partly by reason of the negligence of an employee, the jury ought to determine what part of the injury arises from the negligence of the plaintiff and take away from the sum total of his damages allowed that part which can properly be apportioned to his own negligence. That principle has been called in some of the books the "doctrine of comparative negligence."

In the fourth place, the present bill undertakes to modify somewhat the common law applicable to certain agreements or contracts made between employers and their workmen, in which the latter agree, in consideration of some form of insurance or indemnity fund, to give up the right to sue in the courts.

THE BUREAU OF CORPORATIONS

[The newly created Department of Commerce and Labor numbers among its subdivisions the Bureau of Corporations. The nature of the work of this bureau is set forth in the following synopsis of the first report of the bureau and by extracts from the report of December, 1906.]

THE REPORT OF DECEMBER, 1904

THE first general report of the Commissioner of Corporations, James R. Garfield, covering the period from the organization of the bureau to June 30, 1904, shows that the work of the bureau up to that date had been almost entirely the laying of a foundation of accurate knowledge of the legal and general business conditions with which the bureau must deal and a clear definition of the problems for the consideration of which it was created. The result of the work is summarized as follows:

(1) Commercial and industrial conditions present the foremost problems of to-day. There exists a deep-rooted general feeling of dissatisfaction with existing conditions. Some causes of dissatisfaction are apparent, and the evils very real and great.

(2) The present legal conditions under which corporate business is carried on are extremely unsatisfactory. They admit of, and invite, extreme abuse. They are the result of forced growth under divergent pressures, and in their present anomalous state represent the needs or demands of special interests and are not a permanent body of law adopted to provide properly for all the interests involved. Furthermore, the "State system," applied to interstate businesses, has developed additional and peculiar evils; a diversity so great as to amount in operation to anarchy; an inevitable tendency toward the lowest level of lax regulation, and the unequal and disastrous contest between State Legislatures and commercial forces of national size and power.

(3) No satisfactory reform is to be expected under the "State system" of incorporation.

(4) The Federal Government has at its command sufficient power to remedy these conditions in its control of interstate commerce, supplemented by subsidiary and incidental powers.

(5) So far the commerce clause of the Constitution has had a negative development only, both under Congress and by judicial interpretation. With

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