Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 8, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 November 1875 — How Travelers Are To Be Protected in Russia. [ARTICLE]

How Travelers Are To Be Protected in Russia.

Russia is about to take an important step in advance of the rest of the world iu the control of the steamship and railway interests within the Empire, by making the proprietors strictly responsible for personal damage done, even to their own employes. A law recently prepared by a special commission, and now before the Imperial Privy Council, provides that companies arc in future to be subject to damages for any death or injury caused on tlieir lines to persons either in or out ot their employ, and that such claims cannot be evaded % any previous private agreement for exemption, nor by the plea that all possible precautions have been used. The damages awarded are to be proportioned to the means of the person killed or injured, and are not to be diminished by any supposed impeeuniosity of the company charged. Claims for damages may be" adjudicated on in any Russian civil court of justice under the law, which is to supersede for "all railway cases “the previously-existing rules* as to actions for personal injury. Thus, the presence of the injured person in cases not fatal is not to" be as at is mother similar trials. sincc the Shite itself, through its public prosecutors, henceforth undertakes as a public duty the conduct of all actions afisiug from railway injuries. The extraordinary stringency of this legislation is no doubt a testimony to tbe fact that hitherto the gTeat companies have used the notorious delays and evasions common in Russian justice with so much success that any compensation for injury has been almost unattainable. —Pall Mall Gazette, Prof. tells the following; “ During the after-dinner talk the rough specimen for whom I was surveying remarked that mathematics had always seemed a very wonderful thing to him." Thinking to interest him somewhat, I began to illustrate some of the wonders; among others, tried to show him the way in which Neptune was discovered. After some twenty minutes of elaborate explanation I was"some what taken aback to hear him say: 4 Ye 9, yes: it w very wonderful, very; but (with a sigh) there's another thing that’s al’erS troubled me, and that is,'why yon have to carry one for even- ten; but, if you don’t, ’twon't come out right.’”— Sciibier ftr November. -