Compulsion due to Voluntary Arbitration._--A certain moral
force is, indeed, necessarily behind the award of such a tribunal. It
informs the public what fair-minded men regard as a reasonable
adjustment of the dispute, and forces any one who refuses to accept
such a decision to go on record as claiming more than is presumably
just. This tends to alienate public sympathy, and to forfeit the aid
which sympathy insures. Moreover, where voluntary arbitration is
established by a contract between parties,--where, for example,
masters and men agree that during a term of years disputes that cannot
otherwise be settled shall be referred to a tribunal constituted in
some prescribed way,--the decision of the tribunal is made by the
contract to be especially binding.

_Why Mere Compromises lead to Fair Results._--A merely compromising
policy, such as the one which has often been sharply criticised,
involves an approximation to what strikes would yield; and this, as we
have seen, gives results which, in a rude way, are controlled by
economic law. A fact of the greatest importance is that the awards
made by boards of arbitration with merely voluntary power are not
compromises between mere demands of the two parties; they are between
_genuine ultimata_. When the court is called in, the employer has
offered a rate of pay and stands ready to close his mill if it is not
accepted; and the men have offered to take a certain rate and are
ready to strike if the rate is not given. The essential fact in the
case is that neither of these rates usually varies by more than a
certain amount from the natural level of wages. There is every
difference between a demand put forward for strategic purposes and a
real ultimatum. If workmen knew that a court would simply make an even
division between their own demand and their employer's offer, then men
who were getting two dollars a day might ask for four in the hope that
the arbitrators might give them three. Even if no such expectations
were entertained, it is certain that both parties would exaggerate
their claims; workers would demand more and employers offer less than
they expected in the end to agree upon. When, however, the demands are
not made in this way for the sake of impressing the tribunal, but are
known to be genuine ultimata, the case is quite different. The workers
will actually go on a strike if their demands are not conceded, and
they will certainly have to do this if they make their fig