The Trades' Union Congress at Leicester has been remarkably reasonable
in all its ways—in fact, an exhibition of pure reason itself, as compared with the Congresses at Ghent and Verviers. There were heard not a few expressions of kind feeling towards some ancient foes. Lord Justice Brett, for instance, who sent the gas. stokers to prison, came in for a good word, on account of his views on the law of compensations for injuries ; and Mr. Lowe received thanks from his "masters," for his criticism on the pre- sent law relating to imprisonment for debt. The great improve- ment effected, in the law of Master and Servant was freely admitted ; and the only grievances apparently seriously felt— the state of the law relating to imprisonment for debt and that relating to compensation for injuries to workmen— were very reasonably discussed. The workmen- lane– in regard to the latter, a clear case ; the clumsy, modern Judge-made fiction that a workman who enters the service of a railway, for instance, deliberately accepts as one of the risks of his employ- ment the effects of the negligence of those around him, cannot last. But in regard to so-called imprisonment for debt—which is more properly imprisonment for being able, yet unwilling to pay —have the workmen thought that this must be the death-blow of their credit with small shopkeepers ?
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