Courts are to take notice of all differences arising; but, in cases affecting the future rate of wages or the future hours of work, their decisions are to be held binding for six months only. In all cases, the majority is to decide; and, should the votes be equal, the president is to give the casting vote.

The efforts that have been made by law or with consent-in the former way with little success, but in the latter not without much encouragement-to bring about a better understanding between masters and men, are in themselves a proof that the time had come for ending the long, irritating, wasteful, and, for any good purpose, fruitless war between capital and labour. Trades' unions could not but exist under a state of the law which left individual rights freely to express, assert, and associate themselves. These unions, no doubt, appeared formidable to an unpleasant degree when associated in apprehensive minds, and even in fact, with strikes, if not with outbursts of temper scarcely consistent with submission to that very law which gives the right of association for a common legal purpose. The principle of unionism had its fullest and most powerful expression in the levies of aid from a whole trade to those of that trade engaged in a limited strike. During the stage of passionate excitement, the masters, thus foiled, could perceive no one kind of combination more suitable or more effective than that of a lock-out put in force against the sympathisers. This was naturally productive of hot wars, the duration of which depended, like that of wars in general, on the means of endurance possessed by the combatants.

But, in the waging of these wars, the masters, if they did not quite lose the Gallican notion of their own infinite superiority, learned, at least, to look upon their antagonists in the field with different eyes from those which had before taught them to despise where they ought to have respected. They discovered that the trades' unions, whether good or bad things, were led by men in whom there dwelt an animating spirit very different from that which possessed the Luddites and the rick-burners of former years. The working men, under this new order of leaders, had ceased to do evil, and learned to do well. The vile and stupid outrages of the times of ignorance gradually and all but universally disappeared. Reason took the place of passion, and patience of perversity. In one word, the captains of the united hosts began by frowning down brute force and sheer resentment, and then proceeded to unfurl a flag inscribed with nothing more sanguinary or terrible than "Conciliation and Arbitration." If, with any promptitude, the masters have responded to the call, and to whatever extent they may have honestly and heartily done so, let them receive free, full, and stintless credit. Happy day, when, as one of the foremost conciliators on the side of

the men expresses it, both sides shall confess fighting to be worse than useless, and both anticipate a material gain from laying down their arms together!

Perhaps, indeed, a better form of considering the subject the facts of which have in preceding pages been succinctly, but, it is hoped, lucidly, summarised, cannot be devised than that which the intelligent and clear-headed writer alluded to has set before us.

What, then, is the form of arbitration to be preferred?

Might one form be more suitable for one trade, and another for another trade?

Ought the awards of voluntary Boards to be made legally binding, or should they be left to their chance of voluntary fulfilment ?

Would it be advisable to give power to the Boards to assist, by inquiry and judgment, in the formation and settlement of rules for the trades which they respectively represent?

Can such systems of arbitration as have been declared by law be so assimilated to the practice of voluntary Boards as to strengthen the principle and increase its usefulness and success?

There can be no present doubt that the system of voluntary arbitration has been preferred, and deserves to be preferred, to the systems laid down by law. The Masters' and Servants' Act is not wholly inoperative; but it is altogether ineffective. The Act of Lord St. Leonards, with perfect respect be it said, is a dead letter. The method that is to succeed must neither confine itself to the present nor let the present grow unmanageable before it interferes. The conciliators or the arbitrators must not be to seek because they are wanted in an emergency; but they must be at hand, lest an emergency should arise. A hasty choice is almost certainly a bad choice. The fire-engine must be ready before the flames burst forth, or the house will be burned down. Without an established Board, there would be a temptation on masters and men to take advantage of each other; but, a tribunal being in existence which both have helped to form, and concur in supporting, they are deterred from asking what mere selfishness might dictate, or from refusing what plain justice might demand. When the relations of capital and labour are friendly, then is the time for instituting a Court of Arbitration, to which the representatives of both will loyally submit, and which, in the working of it, shall inspire confidence and command respect.

The experience of France and that of England, so far as they have run in the same channel, combine to prove the superiority of a flexible and elastic scheme of arbitration over one rigorously defined and restricted. Trade is trade, no doubt; but one trade differs from another. Many circumstances of different kinds are easily conceivable as demanding for success in this direction or in that a pliant

system susceptible of adaptation to occasions. To the unpractical eye, a Board armed with legal powers may seem to carry with it positive advantages; but what a voluntary Board may lose, if it do lose, in that direction, is made up in freedom from those forms and trammels which put the statutory arbitrators into a strait-jacket. Young David looked in Saul's armour as fierce as any knight in Lord Mayor's Show; but then, he could not even move under it. There must be in conciliation or in arbitration the utmost liberty for the play of all those influences which determine the character of a trade dispute, bring out facts in exact form and in full light, and overpower the prejudice and the passion which may have been introduced into the question, by the dispassionate expression and suasive application of that special knowledge which both sides are ready to endorse when free from those agitations of the spirits which interfere with a judgment according to knowledge.

The question, Ought the awards of voluntary Boards to be made legally binding? has been really opened, if not decided, by Mr. Kettle, without putting it in precise logical form. The principal thing is, that the arbitration should begin well. The Potteries' Board ask masters to join in one written statement of the case. Such a case might seem to be self-settled. But those who agree upon the facts, may still dispute upon deductions from them. However, a statement of the kind named must greatly simplify and shorten the work of conciliation or of arbitration, as the case may be. The rule, nevertheless, is not of universal application. The practical efficiency of a Board will depend a great deal upon ease of access to it; and some workmen, if not a few masters, are not particularly good hands at written statement. Equality of represenation on the Board is a very main thing. It should be strictly preserved on the occurrence of individual absences. This is one of the discoveries which experience has revealed to the Nottingham Board, besides that mentioned by Mr. Mundella about the inexpediency of a casting-vote in the hands of a member of the Board. This error, corrected at Nottingham, was avoided in the Potteries and in the Iron Trade; and nothing can be better than the plan pursued at Wolverhampton.

Let

It is certainly necessary to the highest utility of Boards of Arbitration, that the awards for which they have been asked with consent of both parties, should be faithfully carried out. None but very foolish men and very short-sighted masters could wish it otherwise. both parties know that the award will carry force, and they will then see sense in having a Board; but which of them, in their right minds, would come before a Board that might pronounce an opinion indeed, but had not the power to settle anything? We agree, therefore, with Mr. Kettle, that the award should be carefully given, under such

circumstances, and in such a form, as the ordinary tribunals of the country would recognise to be binding. It is certain that decisions come to by such men, and under such circumstances, have the strongest moral claims to our recognition, limitation of time and other circumstances always being borne in mind.

For the same reason that a Board of Arbitration ought not to be precluded from prospective questions, even to the extent of dealing with the rate of wages, it should not be prohibited from taking up questions of trade rule. The way to avoid particular disputes is to elicit general agreement; and general agreement, when elicited, can be in no way recorded so advantageously as in the adoption of rules which embody and formalise it. To hand over this power to any mere court of law, though created by Lord St. Leonards' Act, would be a great mistake; but it might be safely entrusted to arbitrators who are the sympathising representatives of both parties interested, and who pretend to no other authority than that of truth, reason, and persuasion. These are not mediating or judging between parties that may never meet again, but between members of the very industry to which both the Board and the parties before it all belong. Unless, indeed, the Board have leave to consider the whole subject of trade rules, the benefit of their wisest and justest awards might be confined to the parties immediately before them; whereas, in nearly every instance, they are adapted to be as useful to the whole trade as to the contending litigants.

If the view taken by Mr. Kettle be sustained, it would seem doubtful whether voluntary arbitration, as practised in the recent form above mentioned, would gain much or anything by the addition of aught contained in Acts of Parliament. The greatest success of voluntary Boards has been in the doing of that in which both those Acts failed. The last meeting of the Nottingham Board, it was once remarked, was occupied with a discussion upon the rate of wages to be paid in future. The last important meeting of the Iron Trade Board was to settle the price of labour for the next twelve months. At the last meeting of the Potteries Board, a question of prices with a view to the future was examined and settled. Each of these three voluntary Boards, in their unfettered freedom, did acts which no form of arbitration known to the law would have allowed to be done. The unlimited scope given to the voluntary Boards is, next to their im partiality, their grand recommendation, because they can take up and deal with any questions whatever of interest to masters and workmen in their respective trades.

GEORGE POTTER.

THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY NOT A PRIESTHOOD.

THE Apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ having received from him

a divine commission, with full power and authority to found and organize the Christian Church, our first consideration respecting the Christian Ministry must be to learn from the New Testament what they ordered or sanctioned for this important purpose; and the opinions or practices of later times must be approved or condemned according as they harmonize with the apostolic institution, or are irreconcileable with it.

The Christian Ministry then, in the New Testament, appears in. two distinct forms; one of which probably had, at any rate in some places, an earlier existence than the other, though both for a while stood as it were side by side, until the former gradually passed away, leaving the other still in force to become a permanent institution in the Church.

These two forms may be called, "The Ministry of Gifts," and "The Ministry of Orders."

The Ministry of Gifts comes first. It belonged to the Apostolic times alone, when preternatural or spiritual gifts (xapíopara) were abundantly shed abroad in the Church. In the earliest part of this period it was exercised the most extensively, and probably in some places exclusively, before the ministry of the other form was sufficiently matured.

Some of the spiritual gifts then bestowed were specially adapted