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arbitration system is strongly condemned and its abolition or drastic amendment advocated.

In a recent publication issued by the " Single Purpose League," an organization embracing many of the leading business men in Australia and formed for the purpose of bringing about the abolition of the system of compulsory arbitration, there occurs this vigorous summary of the evils resulting from it: "The volume of the output of Australian industry has diminished by upwards of 30 per cent. in the last five years, unemployment has become an evil of terrifying dimensions and our economic edifice is threatened with collapse. The only way to kill the creeping curses of unemployment and industrial paralysis which now afflict us, the only way to stimulate industrial activity, the only way to make Australia prosperous and happy is to wipe out the pernicious system that has wrought such deadly harm to the Australian States." Mr. Delpratt, a member of the League and formerly manager of the great Broken Hill Proprietary Company, informed a meeting at Hobart recently that for eight years he had been continually involved in industrial litigation and had never had less than two cases pending. Another speaker on the same occasion mentioned the case of a large Melbourne employer who had actually to carry on his business in compliance with the terms of more than a hundred distinct awards. The confusion, loss and inconvenience arising from the over-lapping of the lattercertain terms frequently being prescribed for a particular industry by the Federal Court and others by a State industrial tribunalare denounced at all meetings of employers with special vehemence.

Even Mr. Hughes, formerly one of the warmest supporters of compulsory arbitration, in a speech delivered at Castlemaine in April, 1922, admitted its failure, and with much truth described it as a "most fertile breeding ground for disputes." Except among the political delegates of the trade unions it is hard to find a single public man of any standing in Australia who holds a different opinion. The President of the Federal Arbitration Court himself, who-hampered by most embarrassing precedents established by his predecessor-has struggled bravely and conscientiously for some years to accomplish an impossible task, lately uttered words which seem to imply a lack of faith in the efficacy of the machinery set up by Parliament for the settlement

of industrial disputes. In signifying his intention to resign his position next year he stated his conviction that the general adoption of piece-work and the payment of bonuses in recognition of superior industry and efficiency were essential for the restoration of stable and prosperous conditions. Unfortunately, however, the Arbitration Court itself by its attitude in the past has greatly increased the difficulty of applying these remedies; for by recognising only the leaders of the trade unions as entitled to speak for organized labour it has enormously increased the authority of a class of men who desire to weaken rather than strengthen all privately-controlled industries, to discourage individual merit and ambition and to diminish the opportunities available for superior workers to attain superior positions.

Bureaucracy is always favoured by bureaucrats. Next to the overthrow of capitalism, the reduction of the whole body of workers to a semi-servile condition appears to be the chief aim of the disciplinarians of the trade union movement. Passive obedience to the decrees of union officials, and active rebellion when ordered, against the authority of his employer are therefore proclaimed to be the duty of each loyal unionist. The living wage, which implies no reciprocal obligation on the worker's part to render honest service and is but the reward of servility, thus means both dying industry and dying freedom. For these lamentable evils there seems to be but one remedy and that lies in the substitution of voluntary for compulsory methods of settling industrial disputes. The conversion of the chief industrial tribunal in Australia into a Court of Conciliation rather than arbitration would at once deprive the enemies of social order in the Commonwealth of their most useful weapon and bring about an immediate improvement in the relations between the two classes whose interests are inter-dependent and whose fundamental rights are now most flagrantly disregarded. Industrial freedom is essential to industrial tranquillity. Happily there is no reason to believe that the moral and political diseases disseminated from Moscow have yet taken root in Australia. The mental soil there is altogether uncongenial, for the gulf between the intelligent Australian workman and the debased proletarian of Russia is deep and wide. But to baffle the pernicious designs of a small body of active and determined men, who are undoubtedly

trying to introduce the plague of Bolshevism into the Commonwealth, it is highly advisable that the network of industrial laws and regulations, by which industry (like Gulliver in Lilliput) is tied down and shackled, should immediately be removed; and that an end should be made of a system of compulsory arbitration, which in its operation not only conflicts most disastrously with the requirements of reason and economics, but violates the basic principles of freedom and justice.

F. A. W. GISBORNE

NATIONALISATION & DENATIONALISATION

"NATIONALISATION" has long been a blessed word,

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growing in influence and authority over an ever-widening

More than any other it crystallises the policy of socialism for popular use. Sometimes it is replaced by a phrase or by an alternative word, such as "socialisation," which is more elastic and permits a choice of methods. But broadly speaking and for popular purposes nationalisation has come to be synonymous with socialism on the practical side. In one form or another it enters into every programme in some degree. It means transferring the economic apparatus, in whole or in part, from private to public ownership and control, either by the State or by local public bodies, which we call municipalities but which have other names in other countries. Municipalisation is in principle merely a variant of nationalisation and is generally included under that term, though the practical differences are considerable. Both represent common or collective ownership and the whole policy is often called Collectivism. Its advocates differ about the extent of the change from private to public ownership. Some would transfer everything, others only certain things. Most programmes contain a list of things to be immediately transferred: they generally include land, mines and minerals, forests and various public services. But the usual formula is "all the means of production, distribution and exchange "; and no doubt all real Socialists look forward eventually to transferring all economic utilities, except the tools owned by independent individuals and employed by them for their own livelihood, which it is now the fashion to exempt from the general law.

This idea of nationalisation or collectivism was originally introduced by Louis Blanc in France and carried further by Constantin Pecqueur, who was the first thorough-going Collectivist. In his little work called " Organisation du Travail," published in 1839, Blanc argued that to get rid of the existing economic evilswhich were in general much greater then than at any subsequent period before the war-the several industries must be "socially organized," and that for this the intervention of the State was

necessary, but only at first, in order to start the workmen, who were eventually to run their own industries under the benevolent supervision of the State. The idea came much nearer to Guild Socialism than to Collectivism proper. Pecqueur, however, completely anticipated the modern standpoint in his "Théorie nouvelle d'économie sociale et politique," published in 1842. He maintained that property and the method of production must be completely transformed. Individual ownership should be suppressed, capital should be socialised, and production carried on by the State. This, he argued, was the only way to escape from industrial feudalism.

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The occurrence of this last expression, which has come up again recently, at so early a date in the history of socialism, may surprise some readers; but that is because the pre-Marxian period has been unduly neglected. It has been the custom to put the earlier Socialists aside as Utopian" and negligible, simply because Engels characteristically depreciated them in order to advertise Marx and the superiority of German thought. But I take leave to say that the socialist movement has subsequently thrown up no leading ideas which did not find expression in that period. Marx himself came in at the tail-end of it on the backs of his predecessors and the only things he contributed were the materialist conception of history, derived from German philosophy, and the call to an aggressive class war: the one a fatalistic, sterile conception, the other a destructive one-both since widely discredited. In the Communist Manifesto (1848) he borrowed Pecqueur's idea of transferring all the means of production to the State, but it was to be the " proletarian State" constituted by the triumph of democracy.

After the general collapse of 1848, State Collectivism passed into oblivion with all the rest until the German revival of Socialism in the 'sixties, under the influence at first of Lassalle, not of Marx. In 1867 the Lassallean organization entitled "The General German Workmen's Union" formally adopted as one of their aims :-" to replace the present method of production by a new method by means of which an equitable division of the commodities furnished by common social production would be realised." And in order to pave the way to this "new state of society" they demanded "the establishment of productive associations on the part of the State in accordance with the plan

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