Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 32.djvu/241

205 A NEW PROVINCE FOR LAW AND ORDER 205 In other words, the people are consumers as well as producers, and the object of the power in the Constitution is primarily to protect the people as consumers; and as incidental to that end to provide means whereby producers can have their legitimate human needs satisfied without recourse to stoppages. There should be no more necessity for strikes and stoppages in order to obtain just working conditions than there was need for the Chinaman of Charles Lamb to burn the house down whenever he wanted roast pork. The arbitration system is devised to provide a substitute for strikes and stoppages, to secure the reign of justice as against violence, of right as against might — to subdue Prussianism in industrial matters. Unfortunately the public do not know all the disasters from which they have been saved by the machinery of the Court. They "do not see because they do not feel." They know the in- conveniences to which they have been put, but they do not realise the inconveniences from which they have been saved. In one case, for instance, little noticed, some of the principal cities would have been left without light but for the interposition of the Court.^ However, something may be learned from a comparison. In Great Britain, according to Mr. G. D. H. Cole,^^ the Board of Trade acting under the Conciliation Act of 1896 dealt with five hundred and ninety-seven cases up to the end of 191 2, and of those two hundred and ninety- two involved stoppages; and in 191 2 of the seventy- three cases, thirty-four involved stoppages. That is to say, stop- pages occurred in nearly half of the disputes handled. In the case of the Australian Court I can recall only two stoppages extending beyond the limits of any one state in disputes so extending, and yet during the same period strikes in local disputes, outside the competence of the Court, have been very numerous. People here know what a gain there is in the fact that there have been no such' social upheavals as occurred in connection with the shearers and the shipping employees before this Court was constituted. The men know well that they cannot get arbitration if at the same time they try to enforce their demands by stoppage of work. They cannot have arbitration and strike too. I find that in the previous article I stated that since the act came into operation there had ^ Gas employees, 11 Com. Arb. (1917). ^ " The World of Labqur."