Social security is a rather new concept on which ideas have not yet really crystallized anywhere. And this is, of course, true of French Canada as well as of English Canada, or England, or the United States. For the present, the initiators of social-security plans have had the best of it, because their proposals have awakened sympathies everywhere in the people in general. As to the élites, they have not yet had much time to turn around, analyse the idea in depth, and pronounce a definitive judgment, the less so because it is considered good propaganda for the time being not to cool the hopes which it may have raised among the common people.

Social security, then, is a new idea in its presentation, which has just been launched and is still taking profit of the smooth seas on which one can almost always count when one is still manoeuvring along the drydocks. Later it will have to meet rough seas, it will have to meet the inquisitive eye of scholars, dissecting it in the light of their philosophy of life, of society, it will have to meet the acid test of experience. When this time comes, and it is coming rapidly, what opinion will definitively take shape in French Canada? French Canadians being what they are, i.e. Gallic-minded and imbued with a Catholic conception of life, what can one expect to meet on that subject in Quebec, if not as a unanimous opinion, at all events as a current of thought more pronounced there than anywhere else? What course can one expect French Canada to take if it is to remain faithful to the essentials of its culture? That is what I shall try to explain, putting before you, first, the essentials which have a direct bearing on the concept of social security. Then I shall proceed, in the second' place, to draw your attention to certain practical points which will show that the views coming out of that process are not at all devoid of factual value.