JUDGMENT

1. This case seems to have so little relation to realities that it is somewhat difficult to know where to begin, It arose out of an application by one Bhagwan Das to file an agreement or submission to arbitration under paragraph 17 of the Code. The learned Judge has dismissed it on the ground that the plaintiff has no cause of action. What he means it is impossible to say, He has also indulged in a great deal of superfluous discussion about allowing the arbitrators to sleep for two years, and various hypothetical suggestions which do not seem to us to have anything to do with the case. Whether from the fault of the parties, or from the lack of firmness on the part of the Judge, the fast is that the matter has been decided as a matter of law without the Court knowing anything about the facts. We constantly have occasion to complain of this method of dealing with oases in applications and one becomes absolutely tired of repeating it. How the learned Judge could possibly suppose that he is doing any good to anybody by deciding an application about which he knows nothing of the merits at all it is difficult to understand. It must go back to him to be heard according to law, and we can only give general directions of a hypothetical nature. The parties, Bhagwan Das and Gurdayal who is the respondent to the application, and is respondent before us entered into an agreement to submit their dispute to arbitration without the assistance of the Court as long ago as June 1918. In that submission to arbitration three parties were named as the tribunal, two arbitrators and one umpire, and all three were to take part in the arbitration, and to give the award. They seemed to take a long time about it, but that is no business of ours or of the lower Courts but of the parties, unless it is shown to have been the result of some deliberate obstruction by one or other of the parties. The agreement provides nothing as to what is to happen if one of the parties either dies, or refuses to act.. The result is that the ordinary law must be resorted to by the party who wants to get on with the business, and proceed to obtain an award, if the arbitrators either retired, or died, or otherwise failed to do their duty. There are provisions to which we need not refer, requiring an arbitrator to make an award within a certain time and enabling the Court to extend the time so as to confer validity upon the award if he delays beyond the stipulated time. The application alleges that one of the arbitrators Sita Ram has refused to act. The allegation as to the name is said to appear for the first time in the argument in this Court, and not in any formal document, or in the proceedings of the lower Court. The odd thing is that nobody really knows, in the sense of tangible evidence, and the Court did not trouble to enquire whether the allegation was true or not. The respondent in a singularly evasive paragraph, which denied and admitted nothing in the Court below, was clearly at liberty, if he disputed the fact, either to offer to produce the arbitrator who was alleged to be refusing to act, or to produce an affidavit from him, or to produce a letter from him. If he had done either one of those things, and the Court had been satisfied that the man was not refusing to act, the application would merely have been dismissed and the arbitration would proceed. All that would be necessary in such a case to do would be to extend the time for making the award. On the other hand the whole thing is as mysterious and comic as it is possible to be. The application does not state who the person is who is refusing. This may be because the facts were so well known to everybody that that it was considered superfluous. It does not seem likely that anybody would some to Court with an application of this kind when be knew perfectly well that the only fact which justified it did not exist The Court must ascertain (it is not for us to tell it how to do the whole of its business),