"The Canadian Labour Disputes Investigation Act" is especially interesting and important because it is serving as a model for a campaign to introduce legislation along similar lines into the United States. Already Mr. Victor S. Clark, the author of the study of the Australian Labour Movement, to which I have referred at the beginning of the chapter, has been sent by Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Taft to investigate into the working of the act. Ex-President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard has also advocated strenuously and at some length a similar statute, and it has been made the basis for the campaign in Massachusetts and other states. Mr. Clark reported: "Under the conditions for which it was devised, the Canadian law, in spite of some setbacks, is useful legislation, and it promises more for the future than most measures--perhaps more than any other measure--for _promoting industrial peace by government intervention_." Here is the very keynote to compulsory arbitration, according to its opponents, whose whole attack is based on the fact that its primary purpose is not to improve the condition of the working people, but to promote "industrial peace by government intervention." Mr. Clark concedes that "possibly workers do sacrifice something of influence in giving up sudden strikes," though he claims that they gain in other ways. "After such a law is once on the statute books, however, it usually remains, and in New Zealand, Australia, and Canada it has created a new public attitude toward industrial disputes. This attitude is the result of the idea--readily grasped and generally accepted when once clearly presented--that the _public_ have an interest in industrial conflicts quite as immediate and important in its way as that of the conflicting parties. _If the American people have this truth vividly brought to their attention by a great strike, the hopeful example of the Canadian act seems likely, so far as the present experience shows, to prove a guiding star in their difficulties._" (Italics mine.) In the agitation that was made in behalf of a similar law in Massachusetts, just exactly what is meant by the word "public" began to appear. It refers not only to the consumers of the article produced by the industry in which the strike occurs, but also to other dependent industries, to the merchants of the locality where the workmen live, and to the real estate interests. Here, then, are definite economic interests which are concerned primarily in the prevention of strikes and in the uninterrupted operation of the industry, and only in a secondary way in rates of wages. _It is not a disinterested and non-partisan public; it is not on the side of the employers nor on the side of the employees, but it is opposed to the most effective weapons the working people have yet found to advance their interests, namely, the strike and the boycott._