350 THE FEDERATIONS AND THE UNION [paArT IV 
arbitrator must obey the law he would be unable adequately 
to settle disputes, and that the award of the Arbitration 
Court being a federal law was paramount over the state law. 
The former proposition was so extraordinary a one that it 
could only be accepted if express language compelled it to 
be accepted, and the second argument was based upon an 
obvious fallacy. The function of a tribunal of whatever 
kind was to declare and administer the law, not to make it. 
It was impossible to accept the argument that, though the 
Commonwealth Parliament had admittedly no power to 
interfere directly with the domestic industries or police 
power of a state, it might by appointing a judge and declaring 
him an arbitrator empower him to interfere. It had been 
argued that though the industrials in the respective states 
were bound by the state law, yet if a group of such industrials 
being dissatisfied with that law associated themselves with 
a group of industrials who were dissatisfied with the law of 
another state, the whole matter was potentially lifted out 
of the plane of state law, but he held that the notion that 
any group of persons could by their mere volition free 
themselves from the obligations of the law with which 
they were dissatisfied, without the aid of a competent 
legislator, was inconsistent with the elemental conception 
of the law. 
The Chief Justice held, however, that the actual award 
proposed could be maintained on the ground that the parties 
to the case could legally have agreed to do what the award 
proposed to lay down. The minimum was higher than that 
laid down by the Wages Boards, and therefore if the higher 
minimum were paid, the state law would not be broken, and 
he so construed the award as to render it consistent with the 
rules as to the payment of old, slow, and infirm workers con- 
tained in the Victorian law. He felt some difficulty as to 
the form of indenture of apprenticeship which it was proposed 
to acquire, as the law of South Australia laid down another 
form, but he considered that that objection was not fatal. 
The Chief Justice noted also the Act No. 2241 of Victoria 
passed after the special case had been brought before the