Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa have two attributes which, taken together, distinguish them from all other countries: they are new countries and they are British Dominions. Economically, their outstanding feature is the relative abundance of their resources in relation to their population and supplies of capital. Politically, it is the fairly recent emergence of self-government under institutions modelled upon those of Great Britain and erected within the loose and conveniently ambiguous constitution of the British Empire. Culturally, too, they are predominantly British; although special reservations must be made in the cases of Canada and South Africa. As a result of their similarities it is possible to draw a number of general conclusions regarding the nature and direction of their growth.

The nature of development in new countries should be a matter of interest to all students of economics and political science because (as Professor Mackintosh has recently pointed out in this Journal) it is in such countries that the impact of development may be most clearly seen and the problems of open, internationally exposed economies most effectively studied. Moreover, the subject is one of great practical importance. It should be familiar to “the Legislators of the Empire, and all who are set in authority over us; that all things may be … ordered and settled by their endeavours upon the best and surest foundations”. Indeed, this paper has been prepared as the background for a larger work on the administrative problems of central banking in the Dominions. This may account for special emphasis on some points, and relatively little on others (such as immigration) which might have been treated rather differently had a more general object been in view.

Standards of living in the prairie wheat economy have been depressed by overhead costs, recurring cycles of drought, specialization in wheat, and dependence on prices determined in world markets. The record of the last eight or nine years has brought suggestions that the greater part of the area should be abandoned or allowed to revert to range use, although a more general assumption has been that drought would give way to years of greater precipitation and that wheat prices would show a measure of recovery. Drought and depression have indicated that throughout the region emphasis has shifted from problems of exploitation to problems of conservation and that, accordingly, an attempt must be made to re-establish the economy on a basis which will reduce the waste of human and economic resources in the future. Individual initiative and local group action will undoubtedly continue to play an important part in the adaptation of agricultural techniques to climatic and soil conditions, but correction of the most glaring mistakes in settlement and land utilization policies demands careful planning and constructive action on a fairly large scale by federal and provincial governments. From the national or social point of view, more is at stake than relief budgets and rehabilitation expenditures, onerous as the financial burden of these charges may be. Successive years of extreme poverty in a depressing environment have begun to sap the morale of all but the most fortunate or the most determined members of the prairie community, and continuance or recurrence of such conditions must ultimately produce a demoralized agricultural population.

The history of Quebec as a province since Confederation has not received the attention it merits. This is the more surprising when one considers the study which has been devoted to the history of Lower Canada, to the old province of Quebec, and to New France. Political disputes at once violent and petty are supposed to constitute the history of Quebec since Confederation. It is unfortunate that this view is so widely held, because along with factional struggles went important and interesting economic, social, and political experiments all more or less closely connected with French-Canadian nationalist aspirations. While many of these experiments were local in origin, their growth had an influence far beyond the boundaries of the province. In this paper I propose to consider only one of these developments: some early French-Canadian views on protection.