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THE LAW

OF

MASTER AND SERVANT.

CHAPTER I.

WHO MAY BE MASTERS OR SERVANTS-RIGHTS AND

LIABILITIES OF:

Adults.-Married women living with, or separate from, their Husbands.-Infants.-Partners.-Lunatics,-Bankrupts.-Corpora

tions.

THE terms Master and Servant * have a much wider application in legal than in popular use. In the latter case they are generally confined to persons between whom there is a wide difference in social rank, and whose relations involve, in a marked degree, superiority on the one hand, and inferiority on the other. But in the former they are nearly, if not

* Whenever we use the masculine gender in referring either to master or servant, it must be understood, unless the context is inconsistent with such a construction, that what we say is equally true of women as of men-of "mistresses as well as "masters"-of "female" as well as "male" servants.

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quite, synonymous with employer and employed. They include all persons between whom any contract exists for the render of service, or the fulfilment of duties on the one hand, and the payment of stipulated hire, wage, salary, or reward on the other, during a determinate or stated period or term, or until the expiration of a fixed notice to be given by either party. The manager of a railway, the head clerk in a large mercantile establishment, the tutor or governess in a gentleman's family, are in point of law as much servants as the domestics in a household-that is to say, the relations between themselves and their employers are governed by the same principles which regulate the connection between cooks or footmen and their masters. In all instances that relation is one of contract, arising out of either an express or an implied mutual engagement binding one party to employ and remunerate, and the other to serve (as we have already said) for some determinate term or period, or until the expiration of a given notice.

As a general rule, every person of the full age of twenty-one years, and not under any legal disability, is capable of becoming either a master or a servant. In order, however, that an agreement may be binding on the employer, the servant must, at the time he enters into it, be free from any engagement which is incompatible with the discharge of his duties; or, at all events, he must take care to inform the person who proposes to employ him, of any such prior call upon his time or labour. If he do not, although the contract will be

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