Wales has been working under the Arbitration Act she has been free from strikes, which by the Act are made a misdemeanour, and no trade union has refused obedience to an award which has been made against it. Sweating, too, has been abolished in the clothing trade, where the abuses were, relatively, as great as in the East End of London. The situation, indeed, has been fairly put by the impartial correspondent of the London Morning Post with reference to a refusal to work on the part of a small section of coal miners:
'The indirect influence of the Australian Act is, of course, a most potent element in the pressure placed upon the men.… The Act and the Court taken together must be credited with exercising a new and effective control over public opinion at large, which has paralyzed the active assistance of all other unions in this State and throughout Australia. Not a finger is being lifted on behalf of the strikers, not a penny is being voted for their sustenance, not a single speech has been made in their behalf by any Labour leader in or out of politics. The champions of arbitration cannot stultify themselves by any connection with those who are defying its principle and attempting to defeat its tribunal. However futile the police prosecutions about to be heard may prove, and must prove if they are to embrace all those who have laid down their tools, the Arbitration Act has at least isolated them and their quarrel, separating them and their cause from their own comrades in other trades as well as from the rest of the community. Such a spectacle has never before been witnessed in this State or in the Commonwealth, where the solidarity of trade unionists has extended and intensified many strikes that would have been comparatively innocuous if left to themselves' (Morning Post, March 17, 1905).
These words emphasize what it is the object of this paper to make clear—viz., that no serious political party in Australia countenances attacks on capital, or contemplates wild-cat legislation. Indeed, the best security
