THE CONCILIATION AND ARBITRATION ACT.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 12551, 3 January 1903, Page 6

THE CONCILIATION AND ARBITRATION ACT.

The Melbourne Age has cruelly chosen the time at which a new book by Mr W. P. Reeves upon "State Experiments in; Australia and New Zealand" is being placed on the market for the publication; under the title|of "Borrowed Plumes,'* of,an article to show that Mr Reeves cannot claim originality in respect to the authorship of "The Industrial.'Conciliation and Arbitration Act, 1894,'' but that he had adopted leading features of that enactment from a Bill drafted.by Mr Kingston, tne Federal Minister of Customs, in 1890. Undoubtedly, the points of resemblance between clauses of Mr Kingston's draft Bill aud the New Zealand Act, which the Age gives in parallel, columns, aro most striking. ' Our Mel; bourne contemporary itself regards the similarity as too marked to suggest any-' thing but that the Now Zealand Bill was made up from the Kingston Bill: And the Age is exceedingly wroth' because Mr Reeves, in its opinion, in the preface he wrote to Mr H. work "A Country 'Without Strike's," endorsed every assertion made by the American writer in the glowing pauegyrio he bestowed upon "the lawyer, journalist, poet, politician, who as Minister of Labour had lha wit to contrive ■ a measure " which is " certainly one of the most original pieces of work done-in modern times." The truth is, of course, that while any claim to the. credit of. originality in the matter is less supportable on Mr Reeves's part than it is on Mr Kingston's—a fact that was recognised by Judge Backhouse when, in his report to the Government of New South Wales on the working' of the conciliation and arbitration laws in New Zealand, he said that " Mr Kingston should get the credit of being' the first to introduce such legislation, as his scheme was submitted to his Parliament before that of Mr. Reeres to his"—neither Mr Kingston nor Mr Reeves' was more than an adapter of legislation that had been pre-. viously proposed and of ideas that had previously been expressed both in 'the colonies and elsewhere. Curiously enough, the publication by the Age of the parallel extracts from Mr Kingston's Bill and Mr Reeves's Act has brought into the field another claimant to the credit of authorship of the provisions contained in the New Zealand law.. 'I'his is Mr A. J. Cuming, who states that, when he was in Christohurch during the period of the maritime strike of 1890, he devised a compulsory arbitration measure which, at the request of; Mr. (now Sir) W.'B. Perceval, he forwarded to that gentleman. Mr Cuming says: " During the following year Mr Perceval was appointed Agent-general for New Zealand, and, assuming, possibly, that I hadi no objection, handed my manuscript to Mr Reeves's tender care. I could never understand how the clauses you have quoted became part of the Bill, as they could not very well have been inserted in committee. But now "I can understand how readily his tools of trade (paste and scissors) came into operation in his desire to get rid to some' extent of my authorship of the measure." From which it would seem that Mr Cuming claims a paternal interest in some of the very clauses that the Age invites us to regard as the offspring of Mr Kingston's brain.