Page:North Dakota Reports (vol. 1).pdf/371

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ELL v. NORTHERN PACIFIC RAILROAD CO.
347

more dangerous, and consequently increase at least the moral responsibility of any other servant who, being aware of the negligence, should fail to report it.” Cooley, Torts, 543. Judge Dillon is equally emphatic against the limitation. He says: “The master owes certain defined, personal, unalienable, non-assignable duties towards servants. These duties may be devolved on others by the master, but not without recourse on him. * * * In the general American law, as I understand it, the doctrine of vice-principal exists to this extent, and no further, viz.: That it is precisely commensurate with the master’s personal duties towards his servants.: As to these, the servant who represents the master is what we may call for convenience a ‘vice-principal,’ for whose acts and neglects the master is liable. Beyond this the master is liable only for his own personal negligence. This is a plain, sound, safe, and practicable line of distinction. We know where to find it, and how to define it. It begins and ends with the personal duties of the master. Any attempt to refine, based upon the notion of ‘grades’ in the service, or, what is much the same thing, distinct ‘departments’ in the service, (which ‘departments’ frequently exist only in the imagiantion of the judges, and not in fact,) will breed the confusion of the Ohio and Kentucky experiments, whose courts have constructed a labyrinth in which the judges that made it seem to be able to find no end; in wandering mazes lost. * * * The real inquiry is, was the injury caused by another servant one of the ordinary risks of the particular employment? If so, the grade, whether higher, lower, co-ordinate, or the department of the faulty servant, is of no consequence. It is a condition of the contract of service that the servant takes upon himself the risk of accidents in the common course of the business, all open and palpable risks, including the negligence of all fellow-servants of whatever grade in the same employment.” 24 Amer. Law Rev. 175. The superior-servant doctrine unfairly discriminates against masters whose business is of such nature that grades of service are indispensible. This case will furnish an illustration of the truth of this statement. ‘The work with respect to which Withnell, the foreman, was careless—the blocking of the pile—was the work of a