appealed both to workers and employers, as worth trying, and before the close of the last century it had rendered the country prosperous, and had attracted the attention of thoughtful people in many other parts of the world to the “Country Without Strikes.”  Efforts were made in several countries to introduce the principle of the New Zealand Statute, but with very little success, as it was generally opposed both by workers and employers:—­the workers feeling confident they could obtain greater concessions by the forceful methods of the strike, and the employers suspecting that any Court of Arbitration would be likely to give the workers more than, without arbitration, they could compel the employers to surrender.

In the mean time the statutory substitute for the strike continued to succeed in New Zealand.  Nearly every class of town workers, and some in the country, had formed Unions, and registered them under the arbitration law.  With a single trifling exception, that was speedily put an end to by the punishment of the Union with the alternative of heavy fine or imprisonment, the country was literally as well as nominally a country without a strike.  And it was something more than that:  its prosperity increased year by year, and its production of goods—­agricultural, pastoral, and manufactured—­increased at a pace unequalled elsewhere.  Yet the prosperity was most apparent in its effect on the conditions of the workers:  under the successive awards of the arbitration court, wages had steadily increased until they had reached a point as high as in similar trades in America, while the cost of living was very little more than half the rate in any town in the United States.  To all intelligent observers these facts were evident, and could not be concealed from the workers in other countries, especially in Australia, as the nearest geographically to New Zealand and commercially the most closely connected.

The effect, however, on the workers of Australia was not what might have been expected.  Attempts had been made by some of the State Legislatures to introduce arbitration laws more or less like the New Zealand statute, but with very partial success.  From the first these laws were opposed by the leaders of the Labor Unions, who naturally saw a menace to their influence in the fact that they became subject to punishment if they attempted to use their accustomed powers over their fellow unionists.  The example of New Zealand was lauded in the Australian Legislatures and newspapers, and even in the courts, till at last a feeling of strong antagonism was developed among the more advanced class of socialistic Labor men, and it was decided by their leaders to undertake a campaign in the neighboring Dominion against the system of settling industrial questions by courts, and in favor of substituting the system of strikes, with their attendant power and profit to the Labor leaders.  The first steps taken were sending men from Australia or England