The last thing I should like to do would be to embarrass anybody in the passing of this Bill, or to do any harm to contributors who have been hardly treated, but I think that we ought to watch the wording of legislation of that character, and the great objection to this amendment in my mind seems to me to come in the middle of the amendment, wherein it is proposed that a District Justice may make an Order compelling the society to pay the benefit. That is a class of jurisdiction that, as I read the recent District Justices Act he does not possess at present.
At present they are administering, more or less, criminal law, and this is an order for the purposes of this Act only—a kind of Chancery jurisdiction by injunction, that possibly needs some change in legislation. As I understand the report of the Judiciary Committee, it was not intended to confer on them any new administration of the law. To put that sort of jurisdiction upon the District Justice by an amendment in a statute of this kind seems to me to be open to very grave objections. If this amendment is accepted at all, it should be accepted only on the terms that the passage down to "benefit" be struck out. It is quite a different thing to say that the District Justice should give some peculiar form of order compelling a society to pay a benefit. How that Order is to be enforced it is rather difficult to understand. I think that the amendment in its present form is dangerous, not so much, possibly, from its being abused in practice, because I do not know that it will ever be put in practice, but as a form of legislation adopted.