Meantime, by quick and desperate efforts, the strike was ended, and the men went back to work.
"This left the fines unpaid.

The labor department solved that difficulty and allowed the defeated government to make its escape from a hopeless situation by paying the miners' fines.
"To all intents and purposes it was the end of compulsory arbitration in New Zealand.

Not nominally, for nominally the thing goes on as before; but actually.

It is only by breaking our shins upon a fact that most of us ever learn anything; and the exalted ministry of New Zealand had broken its shins aplenty on a fact that might have been discerned from the start.
"If you are to have compulsory arbitration, you must compel one side as much as the other.
"But in the existing system of society, when you come to compelling the workers to accept arbitration's awards, you are doing nothing in the world except to compel them to work, and, however the thing may be disguised, compulsory work is chattel slavery, against which the civilized world revolts.
"This is the way the thing works out, and the only way it ever can work out.

There can be no such thing as compulsory arbitration without this ultimate situation.
"If, therefore, any one in America believes in such a plan for the settlement of labor troubles, I invite the attention of such a one to this plain record.
"For my own part, years ago I was wont to blame the labor leaders of America because they steadfastly rejected compulsory arbitration, and I now perceive them to have been perfectly right.
The thing is impossible."[75] A somewhat similar act to the Australasian ones, though less stringent, has been introduced in Canada.