According to the Balfour formula, enunciated by the Imperial Conference of 1926, the position of the United Kingdom and the dominions was that of “autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate to one another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations.” Equality of status as a declared principle was one thing: its application in constitutional procedure was another.

For equality of status did not necessarily mean equality of function. There was a deliberate ambiguity in the 1926 declaration. The United Kingdom and some of the dominions were satisfied with the principle of equality, for an attempt to define its meaning in institutional terms would reveal the disagreement which had been so carefully glossed over. The United Kingdom did not like to think of the dominions as functionally autonomous, for if they were, the sacred shibboleth of the diplomatic unity of the Empire would be undermined, and there were not many in the dominions who were prepared to bear the full burden of the bureaucratic, diplomatic, and military structure which real independence would bring. So, on the whole, ambiguity was preferred. Today, this ambiguity has been resolved. In fact, the Commonwealth in 1926 meant something rather different than it has now come to mean, though both meanings can be covered by the Balfour formula.

Two recent articles by Professors H. Scott Gordon and Anthony Scott present an interesting analysis of the conditions for economic maximization in a renewable resource industry the primary raw material for which is drawn from the public domain. While their criticism of the concepts which now govern fishery conservation programmes will be generally accepted among the handful of economists dealing with the fishing industry, some aspects of the problem call for additional consideration. In this paper I should like to elaborate and modify the general outlines of the analysis, largely in terms of a specific and important case: the Pacific halibut fishery.

As Gordon and Scott point out, the core of the “over-fishing” problem inheres in the fact that the basic resource is incapable of ownership in any meaningful sense. When the demand for a given species exceeds the level at which supplies can be drawn from local waters at relatively constant costs, further exploitation of the fishery gives rise to higher costs at both intensive and extensive margins. The catch per unit of fishing effort will decline in the closer, more populous grounds as stocks are reduced, and greater costs must be incurred in pushing fishing activities to more distant grounds. If the grounds could be and were privately owned, the incremental income resulting from, say, secular growth in demand would, of course, accrue as rent in a purely Ricardian sense. Since they are not, and since there are no substantive barriers to the entry of new vessels, the increasing aggregate returns will simply be dissipated in excess capacity and higher monetary and real costs. If the reduction in stocks, viewed with grave alarm by biologist and legislator alike, now gives rise to restrictions on the catch designed to hold fish populations at some predetermined level or to rebuild them, the increases in price, aggregate returns, and excess capacity will continue. There is obviously no assurance that the final effect on economic output over time relative to total factor inputs is the same, better, or worse than in the absence of such restrictions.

St. Justin occupies a special place in the social study of French Canada. It was there that Léon Gérin began, in 1886, his pioneer study of the rural communities of the province of Quebec. It was on the basis of the data he collected there that he formulated his analysis of rural French Canada as a close causal cycle in which the dominant factors were the family, the land, and religion. The basis of his argument is the proposition that the people of St. Justin lead a life which “presents itself here as a simple juxtaposition of families which are very nearly all equal; nearly all occupied in agriculture; nearly all self-sufficient; but none of which has a higher ambition than to transmit intact the family property to one of the children, although favouring, within the limits of its resources, the settlement of the other children outside the family home.”

He elaborated this proposition into a complex of interlocking institutions which gave to the inhabitants of St. Justin a definite form of social organization, as well as a definite culture. In fact, he built a model which has remained unequalled in the analysis of French Canada. Presented as a functional entity, St. Justin was made to represent a stage in the historical, as well as the geographical, development of Quebec. According to Gérin, St. Justin had reached a balanced relationship among its various institutions. The family unit was said by him to be stable and well-integrated. The size of the farm was in direct relation to the size of the family, and the work on the land, carried out by the members of the family, was limited to their needs. The total output thus depended on the quantity of labour each family could supply for a given unit of land, and on the natural fertility of the soil. The general expectation of the members of a family was limited to the creation and maintenance of a unit of property large enough to supply their daily needs, maintain the aged, and provide for the settlement of those who would have to leave the household to go elsewhere. Such an aim demanded a high degree of personal sacrifice from all the members of a family, and tended to turn family property into a communal possession. While the stability of the family was obtained in this manner, the stability of the community had been achieved through the creation of a single broad social class.

The Maxim “divide and rule” has often been supposed to govern the policy of imperial powers with respect to their dependencies. The United Kingdom, however, has for many years favoured the closer association of its colonies in the Caribbean area, and since 1945 has been actively promoting their federation. As this effort approaches a successful conclusion, it is of some interest to inquire into the reasons for the adoption and pursuit of a policy which seems so much at variance with one of the classic precepts of imperialism.

Any study of local government in Newfoundland requires some consideration of the general historical, political, economic, and geographical background and environment which, to a great extent, have shaped its structure and dictated its peculiarities and problems.

The most startling fact about Newfoundland's local government is that apart from the capital city of St. John's, there were no local-government bodies in the island until 1938. The fisheries have been the all-important factors in the shaping of its political, economic, and social life from its discovery in 1497, determining its destiny and endowing it with its unique character.

Although various settlements were formed under a series of charters as early as the reigns of James I and Charles I, so little progress was made towards colonization that by the middle of the seventeenth century Newfoundland contained less than 2,000 inhabitants scattered along the eastern shore in tiny settlements. By that time it was considered contrary to national policy to allow fishing communities to spring up in Newfoundland or to permit seamen to winter there. The policy was formulated first on the theory that the fishing banks were “a nursery for seamen” whose return to Britain in the autumn of each year was of fundamental importance in maintaining the maritime prosperity and naval supremacy of the mother country, and second because of the influence of the West of England fishing merchants who wanted to maintain their monopoly of the fishery and resisted any attempt at colonizing Newfoundland. Thus a series of restrictive charters was issued by the Privy Council discriminating against settlers in Newfoundland. Nevertheless, by 1783, approximately 10 thousand settlers lived there, even though no indefeasible title to property existed on the island.

Partly because of the extensive range of his thought and partly because of the diffuseness of his style, Veblen is a difficult thinker to classify. Several writers have made passing references to traces of anarchism in his works but most of them consider it a minor aspect of his thought. The thesis of this paper is that Veblen's political and social thought can be most clearly understood and evaluated in terms of philosophical anarchism.

Anarchism is as old as society itself; at least it has been traced back to Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoic philosophy. The Greek derivation of the word is “without a ruler,” not “without order.” Elements of anarchism form a more important part of many political theories than is sometimes recognized, and it has found able exponents in Bakunin, Kropotkin, Tolstoy, Thoreau, and Whitman. What distinguishes the anarchists from other political philosophers is the degree to which they carry their attack on existing institutions and believe in a principle of harmony in nature or human nature which will emerge if these institutions are eliminated. This principle, if followed, will eliminate the need for coercion and the state which they think is based on coercion. Only voluntary functional associations will remain in the anarchist's society but the principle of harmony will prevent the emergence of chaos. Quite clearly this is a philosophy of extremes and suffers the advantages and disadvantages of such a philosophy. In a unique way it forces its critics to examine their fundamental assumptions afresh. But because of the extreme assumptions made, anarchists' writings in general, and Veblen's in particular, abound in contradictions between freedom and authoritarianism.

Sociologists have formulated a number of general theories to explain the residential mobility of immigrants in American cities and the formation of immigrant colonies. One such theory, brought forth by the Chicago school of sociology, conceived the residential mobility of immigrant groups in reference to subsequent waves of immigration. According to that theory, an immigrant group, upon first arriving in a city, tends to settle in a compact community near the centre of the city which is usually a deteriorated area, a slum. As the individual immigrants improve their economic position, they move from this settlement to more desirable neighbourhoods; their place in the old colony, however, is taken by new immigrants. In such a process the older ethnic group may invade a new area near the centre of the city or it may move out entirely from that part of the city to be succeeded there by another ethnic group. This wave theory was successfully applied to Canadian cities to explain the foreign islands of Montreal and the Jewish community of Winnipeg.

Recently Walter Firey has put forth another theory that regards the foreign colonies as more static formations in the ecology of large cities. His study of the Italian settlement in the North End of Boston has showed that Italian immigrants localize social solidarity in their ethnic area. They gather in a section of the city where they are among themselves and may maintain rather undisturbed their special type of life with its old system of values. Thus, the theory of localized social solidarity would imply that ethnic groups show less residential mobility than the native-born population and do not fall in line with the constant “filtering process” whereby the average resident tends to filter, according to his socio-economic success, into better residential districts with higher rents.