Few subjects are exposed to more pitfalls than those concerned with public opinion since the student is so completely influenced by the phenomena he attempts to describe. Objectivity may be improved by considering its development over a long period of time but even a description of this character must register the results of an astigma adjusted to present environment.

Freedom of the press in the United States emerged as a result of a clash with restrictive policies in Great Britain in the eighteenth century. Attempts of the mother country to extend such policies to the colonies involved an attack on the moulders of public opinion at a most sensitive point. Newspapers had developed in relation to printing establishments set up for the purposes of printing laws for the various assemblies and to the post office through which news and advertisements were collected and from which they were distributed. The stamp tax of 1765 imposed a heavy burden on a commodity which sold at a low price and was not to be tolerated by those chiefly concerned. They provoked an agitation which secured its withdrawal. It was followed by controversies leading to the revolution which attracted the contributions of able writers. The active role of the press in the revolution was crowned by a guarantee of freedom under the Bill of Rights.

The rapid growth in size and strength of the trade union movement has been one of the most revolutionary developments on the North American continent during the past ten to fifteen years. The very size and scope of this movement, and the tremendous impact which it has had on the national economies of the United States and Canada, have given rise to widespread agitation for greater governmental intervention and control in industrial relations.

This agitation has created a serious dilemma. There is as yet no clear and consistent body of principles by which to determine in what manner and to what degree governments should seek to regulate labour-employer relations. There is little agreement as to what the primary objective of governmental policy should be. Should it concentrate on reducing strikes and lockouts to the absolute minimum? Or (which is not the same thing by any means) should it be concerned primarily with encouraging collective bargaining as a means of achieving stable and harmonious day-to-day relations? Should it seek to bring about an exact “balance of power” between organized labour and employers by an equal distribution of legal privileges to and equal restrictions upon each party? Or is its primary duty to protect the rights and liberties of individuals against the possible abuse of power by either or both parties?

No one in England would claim that the radical readjustments of the national economy necessitated by the Second World War had yet been completed. Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly true that much progress has been made, in many ways even beyond the pre-war level of attainment, since the fighting came to an end; and certainly the past five and a half years have been a period of intense activity, aimed perhaps not so much at reconstruction of a former economic system but rather at building a structure which should be more in accord with popular aspirations than the kind of economy that prevailed before the war.

This interpretation of fundamental objectives is supported by a quick review of the tasks confronting Great Britain as she emerged from the war. First, and of immediate concern, was the delicate process of transition to a peace economy, involving the innumerable interlocking problems of switching manpower and physical resources back from war service to the purposes of a more peaceable way of life. Then there were more deep-seated problems to be faced, such as the replacement of physical assets, both social and economic, destroyed during the war or rendered obsolescent while the economic system had been concentrated upon the overriding purposes of war production. Along with these went a whole network of complicated problems of monetary reorganization, arising largely from the facts that in process of financing war requirements Britain's international position had been dramatically changed, from the status of a creditor country to that of a debtor, that her international reserves had been heavily reduced, and that her export trade had been ruthlessly sacrificed as part of the larger strategy of war. Finally, and underlying all these, was the widespread demand for the establishment of an economic system which should serve the needs of the people more effectively and more equitably than in times past, above all, one which should guarantee to every willing and competent citizen the continuous opportunity of remunerative employment. Naturally, there was wide disagreement about the best means of securing all these ends; but the ends themselves were generally accepted as necessary and worthy objectives.

In a previous paper on the Canadian upswing, 1921-9, it was discovered that the general level of activity in Canada rose only gradually, in the main, from 1921 to 1924 while a sharper rise occurred in the latter half of the upswing. It was also seen that the accelerated rise of both domestic investment and consumption expenditure contributed to the rapid expansion of national income in the latter half of the upswing, the decline in absolute consumption being an important factor explaining the relative lethargy in the first half of the upswing.

This paper is concerned with some of the external factors which may have been partly responsible for the peculiar pattern of the Canadian upswing. For instance, was the slowness of the Canadian recovery in 1923-4 partly due to depressed conditions abroad and a consequent depression of Canadian export industries? As a prerequisite to testing such hypotheses, the relative strengths of the British, American, and Canadian upswings must be determined.

This paper is primarily an impressionistic sketch of an on-going piece of family research. No conclusions can as yet be offered. Instead, I intend briefly to suggest a frame of reference for the study of family hostility as well as enumerate some of the procedures of field work used in the present project.

Much has been written about the family by many sociologists of various persuasions. Yet a large part of this phase of sociological effort leaves one dissatisfied. Admittedly data on our own types of family structure are hidden from clear view precisely because of their familiarity as well as their privacy. But this fact is not sufficient to account for the disparity between the experienced complexity of family life and the sparsity of published details made significant by a sustained and incisive theoretic orientation. Headway could be made by the use of a frame of reference which combines sociological with psychological considerations, without confusing them, and which draws its vitality from the impassioned analyses of the structure of large-scale social systems and of individual character as begun by Weber and Freud. At the present time family research seems on the whole to have made little consistent use of the leads of kinship analysis and to have by-passed a cumulative effort at spelling out the empirical details of the social structure of various types of American families. As it is, we hear much about the family as a “unity of interacting personalities,” about processes of accommodation or conflict, or about the kinds of valuation that marital partners place upon one another; yet we hear little of the intervening details which, in their fullness, would give us a sense of how indeed a family as an on-going concern functions and how the inherent or emergent demands of its social structure are met, how the social structure of a family is related meaningfully or functionally to the rest of the social system, and how any given family of orientation dissolves into successive families of procreation.