persons employed by it one full day of rest each week. That day shall be Sunday. ART. 2. Exception is made in favor of the establishments in which it is not possible to fix the rest day on Sunday. These may be authorized by the department of commerce and industry, upon request, to fix a day other than Sunday. Such petition must state the reasons for such request. In case of absolute necessity, the department may authorize a rest for a part of the day only. Such special permissions shall as nearly as possible apply alike to all similar establishments, and may be revoked at any time. ART. 3. When four-fifths of the employers in any commercial business or any industry in the Canton demand the closing of shops during the whole or a portion of the day of Sunday, the Council of State shall publish such petition in the official sheet, and notify all persons interested and who are not petitioners to file with it a statement of their wishes regarding the order of closing. At the expiration of one month the department will act upon the petition. It may decide upon the general and obligatory closing as intended by this law. In case of the obligatory closing of pharmacies, the council shall establish a scheme for closing by turns (rotation) so as to leave open a portion of them sufficient for the public needs. The Council of State shall decide all questions of petition, and the classes of commercial and industrial establishments affected. ART. 4. Each industrial and commercial establishment must file with the department a statement showing how the rotation of Sunday work is observed in it. Each establishment to which a permit is granted under article 2 shall keep an exact and detailed record of the rest days allowed each of its employees since the beginning of the current year, which record may be demanded at any time by the competent authority. It is reported that many establishments have closed since the law became effective. In the group " food shops," 1,100 to 1,200 meat shops, milk depots, groceries, and other shops have already secured "obligatory" shop-closing orders. Barbers have closed entirely. Hat shops and shoe shops are petitioning for orders of closing. Pharmacies are open by rotation only. The three markets (trois halles) of the city of Geneva have remained closed all day Sunday since January 1, 1917. DISEASE AS A COMPENSABLE INJURY. A recent settlement is announced under the compensation law of Illinois on account of the death of 20 employees due to diphtheria and typhoid fever. These diseases were contracted by drinking polluted water furnished by the employing company. No contest against the payments was made by the company, the settlement being voluntary, according to a statement by one of the members of the State industrial board. The Illinois act contemplates the payment of benefits for accidental injuries arising out of and in the course of employ ment, the term accidental, according to the construction usually adopted, eliminating the ordinary occupational diseases from the scope of the act. The English compensation law recognizes as compensable certain designated diseases said to be "due to the nature of the employment." Most of the American acts exclude from their purview diseases other than such disease or infection as naturally and unavoidably results from an injury, though cases appear in which a disease was itself classed as an accidental injury. Under the Massachusetts law the injury need not be accidental, and it is the established practice to compensate occupational or industrial diseases, so-called; while in California, where the original law has been amended by eliminating the word "accident" throughout, a recent decision indicates the adoption of a like policy (p. 88). In other States, however, in which the qualifying term "accidental" does not appear in the law, the construction of the courts has not been favorable to the inclusion of diseases of this nature, though in one case it was admitted that the term “injury” was broad enough to include every kind of disability, whether due to accident or not. It was held, however, that the law should be restricted to injuries of an accidental nature, i. e., those due to some sudden and unexpected event inflicting bodily harm and resulting in a period of disability. (Industrial Commission of Ohio v. Brown (1915), 92 Ohio St., 309, 110 N. E., 744.) 1 It is apparent that the failure to include so-called occupational diseases within the scope of the act, while permitting compensation for other diseases, must be based on a difference as to their nature and origin. No definition of occupational diseases seems to have been generally accepted. The British expression, " due to the nature of the employment," can hardly be said to be an attempt at definition. Dr. W. Gilman Thompson says that they "may be defined as maladies due to specific poisons, mechanical irritants, physical and mental strain, or faulty environment, resulting from specific conditions of labor." Another authority (Dr. Von der Borght) speaks of them as "those maladies which arise as the result of the prolonged action of harmful influences in certain occupations, and which consequently and exclusively occur in persons working in those trades, or at least more frequently than in other persons in general." With a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances enumerated, it would seem possible to anticipate certain results, so that they would be removed from the classification of accidental injuries; or, as was said in an opinion of an administrative official in passing upon the claim of a workman who suffered from lead poisoning from inhalation of fumes produced by the burn 1 The occupational diseases, their causation, symptoms, treatment and prevention, New York, 1914, p. 1. ing of lead paint: "It can not be said that these fumes were inhaled by accident. The fumes were necessarily produced by the work he was engaged upon. The inhalation of such fumes was to be expected, and probably could not have been avoided. Lead poisoning, under the circumstances, was the natural, if not the inevitable, result." (Schroeder case; Op. Sol., Department of Commerce and Labor, pp. 172, 175.) Compensation as for an accidental injury was therefore denied. This same official (the Solicitor of the Department of Commerce and Labor) allowed compensation in a case of compressed-air illness, otherwise known as "bends" or caisson disease, distinguishing this as a traumatic disease due to the lesion of tissues on account of the abnormal atmospheric pressure. This disease, however, is classed as an occupational disease by the British law and in treatises on the subject. Other traumatic diseases, i. e., those due to an injury or wound, as in the case of lockjaw or other infection, would be excluded from the class of occupational diseases as being entirely unrelated to the nature of the employment. Such diseases, if the sequel of a compensable accident, would, of course, come within the provisions of all compensation laws. Typhoid fever and diphtheria, for which compensation was paid under the Illinois law, are neither occupational nor traumatic in their origin, but are idiopathic, i. e., of primary causation, and are subject to compensation, if at all, either on the basis of being accidental injuries, or as injuries arising out of employment merely, under laws not requiring the injury to be accidental. In view of the fact that the settlement in the Illinois case was voluntary, no opinion of the commission or of any court of the State is available as an expression of an official construction of the statute on this point. However, traumatic peripheral neuritis, due to constant vibration of a punch press on which the workman was engaged, was made the basis of an award by the industrial board of the State; so also was gas poisoning producing cerebral hemorrage, where the workman was engaged for several hours in close proximity to a gas flame in which the combustion was imperfect. This was definitely classed as accidental, defining an accident to be "an untoward event not expected or designed." Compensation was also allowed (1917) in a case of acute arsenical poisoning from inhaling fumes from a spelter furnace, the event being unforeseen and unexpected-indeed, the first of its kind in the establishment in an experience of 40 years. Direct precedent for an award, if the case had come before the board for hearing, is found in a case under the Wisconsin statute (Vennen v. New Dells Lumber Co. (1915), 161 Wis., 370; 154 N. W., 640). In this case typhoid fever was attributed to impure drinking water furnished by the employer, and was held to be the proximate and accidental cause of death, the disease having been contracted while the workman was performing service growing out of and incidental to his employment. (And see p. 93.) The decision in the Vennen case, classifying the contracting of a disease as an accident within the law, clearly eliminates the necessity of injury by violence, accepting the customary conception of physical force as a necessary factor. That the idea of the exertion of force is not essential, however, appears not only from the decision in the case last cited, but further from a definition given by the Supreme Court of Connecticut (Linnane v. Aetna Brewing Co. (1916), 99 Atl., 507), in which it is said that "an accidental bodily injury is a localized abnormal condition of the living body directly and contemporaneously caused by an unlooked for and untoward event or an unexpected condition." An inferior court of Pennsylvania was even more explicit in its statement that violence is not necessarily force, and that the action of any extraneous substance resulting in a disturbance of the structure of the body is violence within the meaning of the legislature (Roller case, Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, 1917). In this case dermatitis, due to the fortuitous presence of poison in hides handled by the employee, was held to be compensable as an accidental injury. Whether the Supreme Court of Connecticut would go quite as far as this can not be determined from a comparison of the facts in this case with those in the Linnane case, in which that court announced its definition of an accidental bodily injury. In the Linnane case a claim was made for compensation for the death of a workman from pneumonia, which was held to be due to exposure to storm resulting in the wetting of the workman's garments and his continuing to work with alternate exposure to heat and cold during a period of several hours. Compensation was denied on the ground that personal injury within the act involves both an accident and a bodily injury, and mere untoward or unexpected weather conditions, resulting in disease, do not come within this requirement. The line drawn would appear to be the absence of lesion, classing the lesion as an accidental injury, if one may judge from the fact that the same court had allowed compensation (Larke v. Insurance Co. (April, 1916), 97 Atl., 320) in the case of an employee whose work required him to be out of doors on an extremely cold day, during which time his nose was frozen, erysipelas following with fatal results. It was pointed out in this case that personal injuries of accidental origin included bodily harm "whether arising by direct contact or lesion caused by external violence ** or untoward mishap." That a lesion is essential might be inferred from the fact that the same commissioner who made the original award in the Larke case denied benefits to a workman who suffered frostbite of * case. In this case no disease was alleged to have developed, the claim being based simply on disability due to the injury from freezing a form of disability for which the Supreme Court of Massachusetts has awarded compensation (In re McManaman (1916), 113 N. E., 287). Disease due to inclement weather conditions was the basis of an award by the Supreme Court of New York (Rist v. Larkin & Sangster (1916), 156 N. Y. Supp., 875), though there was some complication of causes. In this case a heavy cold followed by pleurisy and pulmonary tuberculosis was attributed to the accidental necessity of the workman jumping into a river where the jumping itself had no immediate disabling effect, but the wetting and the subsequent exposure were chargeable with having caused the disease. A Connecticut commissioner denied compensation where a claim was based on pneumonia following exposure, saying that the evidence only indicated a possible connection between the employment and the disease, but fell far short of establishing any direct causal connection (Shay case, 1915). A distinction is doubtless deducible between the conditions in the Rist case, where the workman was accidentally wetted, and the Shay case, where there seems to have been simply an exposure to inclement weather conditions, injury in the former case being classifiable as following on an industrial accident, which, though not in itself such as to be injurious, was found to be casually connected with the injury. This would accord with the position that infections and diseases causally connected with a recognized accidental injury are compensable, while injuries simply contemporaneous or coincident with employment are excluded. The identical disease, pneumonia, for which compensation was denied in the Shay case, was the basis of an award by a commissioner in the same State where there was septic poisoning from a sliver in the thumb of a workman, the disease being held to be causally connected with the injury. The Industrial Accident Board of Illinois reached the same conclusion in a similar case, septic pneumonia being held due to an inflamed leg following an abrasion from a fall, compensation being allowed. No disease is more clearly defined or generally recognized as an industrial or occupational disease than lead poisoning. As already indicated, it is capable of exclusion from the class of accidental injuries by reason of the well-known consequences of continued exposure to the dust or fumes of lead, or to direct contact with it. A distinction was drawn by the Solicitor of Commerce and Labor in construing the Federal statute of 1908 between the gradual contraction of the disease by workmen whose employment inherently involved exposure to the dangers of lead poisoning, and those who would be so exposed only casually. Thus, workmen cleaning lead |