Canadian local-government institutions have been influenced by those of both Great Britain and the United States, yet they retain a distinctly Canadian character. Few residents of the United States have been acquainted with Canada's internal governmental problems, because there has been relatively little information available. Canada's top political leaders have been pre-occupied with making Canada a nation, one prepared to take its place in world affairs. But what of the governments within the Dominion? The Rowell-Sirois Commission hearings and its reports in 1939 brought to the attention of many people the problems of dominion-provincial relations. More recently, the Goldenberg report in British Columbia brought attention to certain provincial-local relationships. During the 1930's, many persons in the United States became interested in the Canadian provincial boards of municipal affairs because those boards seemed to offer a means for disciplining improvident municipalities and maintaining good fiscal standards. Viewed in their full perspective, however, these boards and the departments of municipal affairs in Canadian provinces illustrate vital developments in central-local relations. Within the past forty-five years, Canadians have moved rapidly in developing the vast natural resources of the country and in building cities, towns, and villages.

Rural local government received considerable attention during 1947 at the hands of state legislatures and the general public. The legislative sessions in many states were the first regular meetings since the end of the war, and therefore afforded the earliest opportunity to deal at length with various postwar problems and with certain problems of a peacetime nature on which action had been deferred during the war period. Perhaps the most significant phase of the year's developments was the conferring upon counties and townships, or special districts serving unincorporated areas, of numerous powers of a regulatory or service nature traditionally possessed only by municipalities. Another subject which received major attention was that of finding new and increased revenues to finance expanded programs of local services at rising price levels. Widespread interest was also displayed in such matters as areal readjustments, the modernization of local-government structure in the interest of efficiency and economy, and intergovernmental coöperation in the performance of local functions. In reviewing the events of the year, a topical arrangement similar to that used in previous summaries will be followed.

I. Areas

New Areas. State legislation authorizing the establishment of special-purpose districts was more extensive in 1947 than for several years past. Problems of water supply, sewerage, and refuse disposal frequently overlap political boundaries and sometimes involve suburban and rural areas as well as incorporated communities. Several states authorized the creation of special districts to deal with these and related problems. In some instances the districts are permitted to include only unincorporated territory, while in others they may embrace two or more municipalities or both incorporated and unincorporated areas. Nebraska and South Dakota authorized the organization of sanitary districts to provide sewage-disposal facilities in areas outside municipalities. Boards of county commissioners in Utah were empowered to establish improvement districts to provide water supply and sewerage for unincorporated areas. Special districts for supplying water, sewerage, or both, were authorized in Idaho. A Nevada law permits the establishment of districts for supplying water, sewerage, and garbage disposal, singly or in any combination.

The ever-increasing volume of litigation in state courts has made it necessary to exclude this year all decisions of courts other than those of last resort. In addition, with respect to subjects such as “police power” and “equal protection,” where classification or analysis of the decisions would require space out of all proportion to their importance, only a listing of the subjects involved in the case is attempted. The cases fall generally into the pattern used last year.

I. GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATION

1. Special Constitutional Provisions. The effective date of a new constitutional amendment was the subject of two decisions this year. In one, the amendment extending the term of office of county attorneys from two to four years was approved at a general election in which county attorneys were elected. The court held that the officers elected then were elected for the longer term, even though the amendment by its own terms did not become operative until the January following the election. This was so, even though the required local notice of the amendment omitted the effective date, since full state-wide notice was published by the secretary of state. The other case holds that the amendment becomes effective on the date of the canvass of votes rather than on the date of the election. Here, too, there were irregularities in the published notice in that it was not published in all counties on the same days and minor inconsistencies appeared in the printed versions. The court held that the purpose of notice had been substantially served.

In 1940, a total of 1,500,000 students (16 per cent of the 18–21-year-olds) were in attendance in American colleges. This was before the advent of G.I. education, which brought the figure up to 2,350,000 (24 per cent of the 18–21-year-olds).

These vast numbers of students, presenting a challenge to the present generation of college teachers, are of particular portent to the political scientist. The latter, relying largely in the past on his own interpretation of the subject matter based upon standard texts as “the method” for courses in government, is faced with the problem of mass education; as a result, some of the standard teaching techniques are ineffectual. Under these conditions, to what extent can technological changes in mass communication media which have for the most part been ignored at the college level make a contribution?

Audio-visual materials are available and in standard use in medical schools; teaching operative procedures from a televised performance was a regular part of the last medical convention at Atlantic City. Science equipment consisting of laboratories, museums, Balopticans, slide projectors, and motion picture machines are standard for science departments. Even college budget officers, immune to faculty pressure of various types, are sensitive to the demands of science departments for equipment. Such sensitivity, however, does not apply to the social sciences; budget officers still need to be convinced that social science departments have equipment requirements, beyond an allotment to the library for new books.

The announcement in October, 1946, that in future a single Minister of Defense will sit in the British cabinet, and that the ministers of the three armed services will no longer be of cabinet rank, marks the culmination of a long and important trend in Britain's governmental organization. It is also of interest as the present British answer to advocates of a merger of the Navy, Army, and Air Force. To see the full meaning of this step, it is necessary to refer to two closely related problems of long standing: the question of the size of the cabinet and that of what is broadly known as imperial defense.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the British cabinet, originally ten or eleven in number, increased to about fourteen or fifteen in the 1870's and 1880's. By the end of the century, however, increase of governmental services and multiplication of departments raised the normal size of cabinets to nineteen or twenty, and after the first World War to twenty or even twenty-two. Since the cabinet as such functions as a committee, it has been frequently pointed out that the present size is too large for prompt and decisive deliberation; and the experience of two great wars has shown without question that large-scale planning and the coördination of the innumerable interlocking aspects of a national war effort require a much smaller and more cohesive group. The existence around the premier of an inner circle of three or four ministers, among whom many of the most important decisions are made, is as old as cabinet government, but cannot be satisfactory for modern needs.

In recent years, party theorists have been much concerned over the validity of the sectional interpretation of American politics. One contention is that sectionalism, if still valid, is being modified, or supplemented, by an urbanrural party alignment which bodes major change for the future. This intuition is of comparatively recent vintage, certainly not a product of the study of political trends before the New Deal, although one writer has attempted to construe a specific earlier election in terms of the tension between urban and rural areas. In the 1920's, however, most analysts decried the urban-rural thesis. Professor Holcombe, writing in 1924, asserted that “whatever may be the cause of the existing partisan alignment in national politics, it is not primarily a conflict between rural and urban interests.” And Stuart Rice concluded in 1928, after specialized studies of voting trends, that “antithetical” facts belie any interpretation of urban-rural election divisions which suggested a clearly defined cleavage.

The literature on this subject which has appeared since 1932, however, has persistently suggested a new urban-rural modification of the pattern of presidential politics. In 1933, Professor Holcombe commented on the “radically different … urban politics of the future.”

Some day, if and when the files of recollection left by Charles E. Hughes are open to research and discussion, it may be entirely clear how it happened. I am quite sure such memoirs exist, for only a year or two ago Mr. Hughes told me at his home in Washington that he would never write an autobiography, but intended to leave a record of his public activities in such form that it would be available to those who could make good use of it in the future. We had a good laugh that day over the disparity of the actual facts and the public understanding about them in some instances with which we were both familiar, as far back as the very controversial days of the Hughes governorship of New York State.

Traditionally, American public interest in national defense has been sporadic, alternating between short periods of intense concern and longer periods of general indifference. Except for World War II, the only sustained military effort since 1789 was provoked by internal strife. American manpower ended the stalemate of World War I, but our participation was neither lengthy nor economically intensive.

We often forget that one of the first purposes motivating the Founding Fathers was to “provide for the common defense.” Six of the eighteen clauses in Section 8 of Article I of the Constitution, defining the legislative authority of the new federal government, deal with military matters. It was no accident that in the early issues of the Federalist John Jay and Alexander Hamilton should have dwelt at length upon the defense requirements of the American states. Properly, Hamilton was concerned also to demonstrate that under the proposed constitution the military would be subject to the civilian authority.

It must be confessed that, outside the inner circles of the administration, people in Great Britain show little interest in their civil service. It is taken for granted by the majority and used as an Aunt Sally by a considerable minority to whom the merest suspicion of that much overworked epithet, “bureaucrat,” acts as a red rag to a bull. Much wider interest in the British civil service has, in fact, been shown in the United States, whence the most illuminating writings on the subject have almost invariably emanated. For this reason, the present writer believes that there must be many members of the American Political Science Association who will be interested in a brief survey of civil service development, with particular reference to the changes at present in hand. It might be as well to point out that this essay is written with all the prejudices of a writer in Britain, e.g., with regard to the importance of open competitive recruitment and a quite different approach to veteran preference; but this in itself may add something to the article's interest.

The National Security Council, created by the National Security Act of 1947, is the instrument through which the President obtains the collective advice of the appropriate officials of the executive branch concerning the integration of domestic, foreign, and military policies relating to the national security. An outline of the genesis of this new governmental agency will indicate in part its present rôle.

Even before World War II, a few far-sighted men were seeking for a means of correlating our foreign policy with our military and economic capabilities. During the war, as military operations began to have an increasing political and economic effect, the pressure for such a correlation increased. It became apparent that the conduct of the war involved more than a purely military campaign to defeat the enemy's armed forces. Questions arose of war aims, of occupational policies, of relations with governments-in-exile and former enemy states, of the postwar international situation with its implications for our security, and of complicated international machinery.

The Executive Office of the President of the United States was established in the summer of 1939 through the associated, if not wholly harmonious, endeavors of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Seventy-sixth Congress. The Reorganization Act of April 3, Reorganization Plans No. 1 of April 25 and No. 2 of May 9, and the Joint Resolution of June 7, were the principal stages in a labyrinthine course of policy-formulation that culminated September 8, 1939, in the issuance of the celebrated Executive Order 8248. Today, ten years later, it is virtually impossible to conceive of the Presidency without the Executive Office, so essential has this nexus of administrative machinery become to its proper functioning. The end of a decade of unparalleled presidential activity would seem a proper season to take stock of the Executive Office of the President: to recall the reasons for its creation, total up the many additions and subtractions that have followed in bewildering and not always purposeful profusion, sketch its present composition, and, most important, call attention to its waxing significance as a key institution in the American system of government.

One wonders what the ghosts of Talleyrand and Franklin would say were they to visit the diplomatic conferences of today. Where is the suave approach, the graceful phrase concealing bloody warnings dropped by a king to the music of a minuet or passed by an ambassador to a minister of state over the after-dinner port? How surprised they would be at the blunt Bevin with his frequently unconcealed ill humor, at Molotov, rude and blustering, at Byrnes publicly changing his course in midstream, at Marshall announcing state policy in speeches rather than to plenipotentiaries or through official documents.

How surprised Talleyrand and Franklin would be to think of international relations carried on pursuant to slogans such as “open covenants openly arrived at.” How their shrewd eyes would have twinkled at the credulity of people who believed that they had democratized foreign affairs through such a slogan. The old school diplomats would scarely have confused headlines which report in large black type the speeches of the diplomats, or the political gossip columns which purport to repeat the whispered asides of statesmen, with covenants democratically negotiated.

The fact is that although we have gained publicity for foreign affairs, and that in itself is important, we have not democratized foreign affairs. They are still the business of technicians. They remain the preserve of foreign offices.

The purpose of a military organization is to fight and win wars. This dictates its form, creates its methods, explains its nature. A military organization must be flexible in structure, but inflexible in discipline. It commands, and it must be commanded; but it also leads, and must be led. Its orders must be at once peremptory and persuasive, its authority unquestioned but openminded, not rigid.

It creates and uses a science of force and power, a machine of destruction; but it is not itself a machine, or mechanical. It calls upon every resource of the human intellect and heart, and its proper use is more an art than a craft or a science. For it is a synthesis of the ideas and emotions of men, and its greatest strengths and worst flaws are imponderables.

Dartmouth's new required course for seniors, called “Great Issues,” is avowedly an exercise in training for more effective citizenship. Its twofold purpose is to arouse in students a greater sense of public-mindedness and to make them more competent in the use and evaluation of the common sources of public information. Thus the Great Issues course, dealing with college students at the moment of their greatest undergraduate maturity, is pointed toward the problems of citizenship which beset a person in his adult years, just as it is also pointed toward the problems of adult education. It might, therefore, be described as an attempt to facilitate the transition from the methods of undergraduate instruction to the methods which adult citizens have to rely upon in securing the information necessary for making well-informed decisions.

The principal textbook in the course is the daily and Sunday editions of either the New York Times or the New York Herald Tribune, according to the students choice. Other reading assignments are such official or semi-official publications as the Acheson-Lilienthal report, the Supreme Court decision and minority opinion in Everson v. The Board of Education of the Township of Ewing, and To Secure These Rights. Students are required also to read in entirety designated numbers of such magazines as the Atlantic, Harper's, Saturday Review of Literature, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, The Nation, and Foreign Affairs, as well as a few particularly apposite current books.