The employer must take the word of the laboring man for that, because the laboring man is where he can see and know, and the employer is not in a similar position. The result of that is to increase the confidence in the laboring man, to increase the precautions taken to prevent accidents, and to increase the mutual respect and good feeling between the two men, if you place them both where they have a mutual and certain liability.
As to what is a dangerous employment, as to whether or not you should cover some or all, I have no doubt that there is not a man in this country, a farmer, a mechanic, a laboring man, a doctor, a lawyer or any other professional man, but what is perfectly willing to have and desires to have a fair compensation law if he can know just what it is going to cost him, and just what his insurance will cost him, in order to avoid the present uncertainties and evils that flow from existing conditions. The case of domestic servants has been mentioned here. One of our judges in the federal court in our State had a servant break her leg on his back porch last year. He took her to the hospital and took care of her, but would not he rather have been paying three dollars a year for insurance for all the risks that might come to her in that industry? Would not you rather do that yourself? And besides that, from the humane standpoint, would not you rather that the poor girl should be placed in a position where she certainly will receive compensation in case of an accident which perhaps she or any one else could not have avoided, than to have her go on and lose her wages or else you pay them to her?
Then you say you must not go to the farmer. I say to you that I believe that the farmers in this country would welcome such a proposition if they understood it. There is not a man, an employer or a laboring man, who, when you place the proposition before him in any such form as we are discussing it here, would sanction it off-hand. But there is not a man in this country that I have ever seen who has studied this question for any length of time, intelligently and carefully, but what believes that the more nearly you can get every industry into one certain, definite and simple liability the better off you are.