THE ARBITRATION ACT.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1352, 1 February 1912, Page 4

THE ARBITRATION ACT.

Wk have dealt separately with the immediate and urgent aspects (if the tramways strike, but we should be neglecting a plain duty if we failed to call the public's attention to this fresh reinforcement of the case against the Arbitration Act. During the first twelve or thirteen years of the existence of this fantastic attempt to regulate the storms and currents of industry, no occasion arose for submitting the Act to a genuine test, and a great many foolish people, here and in other countries, concluded (hat the printed words of the statute possessed some tit! ism an ic/ power. This short-sighted opinion was not disturbed by the fact that whenever, in an older country, a step has been taken towards smoothing the working of industry, that step has nearly always been along another path than that which Mr. Ueeves, with the cocksureness of ignorauce, imagined to lie along firm ground. The critics of the Act have never wavered in their conviction that it is impossible to prevent strikes, or even to mitigate the troubles of industry, by an Act the essential assumption of which is that industry will run, and 711CI1 work, according to any law that a Parliament may prescribe. But the friends of the Act always quoted the absence of strikes as proof of the wisdom of the law. During the past four years, however, it has been made manifest, in a long,series of strikes, that whenever that situation arises which the Act has been said to make impossible, the Act has collapsed. It has not merely failed of its purpose on these occasions; it has simply been disregarded. Yet such has been the folly of those who hitherto have inarched with the discredited army of "Liberalism" that instead of admitting frankly that the Act is bad in principle, they have struggled to patch the thing up here and there to meet the shocks of circumstance. With all their patching, they have made tho Act no more effective than it ever was. The tramwaymen have not considered the Act at all. If it occurred to theni that they were breaking the law, it occurred to them only as a trifling, and not unamusing, detail of their position. The Act has been a monstrous fraud. Had it secured industrial peace, jt would still have, been a noxious measure, enormously injurious to the industrial development of the nation. But it has not even been able to secure peace. Strikes take .place, and will continue to take place, as if it had never been passed. Indeed, it makes strikes more easy by 'its existence, for under its shadow there has grown up an intolerant and tyrannous spirit, and a spirit of lawlessness of which thf! current strike is a simple expression. Nobody can any longer defend the Act. Whatever merits can be claimed for it, and they are few,, can be found in a higher degree in those other systems of industrial regulation, such as the Wages Boards system or the Canadian law, the essence of which is a denial of the root principle of Mr. Reeves's foolish idea. There arc still, perhaps, a good many people who will shrink frorn the idea of ''repealing tho Arbitration Act," believing, in defiance of the evidence of their senses, that tho Act is a wise and beneficent safeguard of industrial decency and order. There is no longer any reason, however, why Parliament should not discard what is after all only a foolish doctrinaire's foolish and exploded theory, and erect upon its ruins a new system of regulation that will do justice to employers and employees, and that will avoid the great evil of accustoming the public to see the law of the. country treated with contempt.