Canadian universities have not been as enterprising as their American neighbours in seeking out new ways of serving the community; but they have deviated far enough from the straight and narrow path of academic scholarship to develop a sense of guilt for which atonement may be offered by devoting a part of their resources to the promotion of graduate studies.

In the United States we find a desperate effort being made to save the M.A. degree from the fate which has befallen the B.A. degree, by applying truly heroic remedies, such as insistence on serious qualifications for admission to candidacy, on “graduate standards of attainment,” on “proper use of spoken and written English,” on “a reading knowledge of at least one foreign language … as indispensable background and not merely as a tool for research.” A candidate should have obtained “an average grade which places him in at least the first third of his class” and “due attention should be paid to those qualities known as personality and, in particular, to moral character.”

A sense of guilt may be a very potent force, but it requires rationalization. Various reasons have been assigned for promoting graduate studies in Canada. Professor Brebner contends that an increased output of scholars, retained in Canada, could be employed in “the creation of Canadian culture.” In so doing they would solve what Professor Brebner considers ought to be “the most urgent problem for Canadian post-war planners,” namely “how to make Canada so cordial and attractive a place” that Canadians “who excel in any field” will be content to live and work there. It is nearly fifty years since American universities set about the task of meeting “needs for the satisfaction of which approximately 300 out of a total of some 500 advanced students at the time considered it necessary to go abroad.” Canadians have continued to pursue graduate studies in other countries, but it is possible to argue that young Canadians cannot rely as much as in the past on the opportunities offered for advanced work at British and American universities.

The adaptability of the British form of cabinet government to local conditions in many lands is illustrated in a unique fashion in Prince Edward Island. The same type of executive which governs in the large and populous parts of the Commonwealth has developed in miniature in the tiny and isolated province which boasts a land area of only 2,184 square miles and a population of little more than 93,000 persons; and, on the whole, it has worked extremely well. Broadly speaking, most of the principles associated with cabinet government elsewhere are recognized in theory on the Island. The familiar steps in the development of responsible government have taken place in much the same way as in other provinces. The idea is generally accepted that the Cabinet is a team operating on the basic principles of mutual confidence and solidarity among its members, collective responsibility to the Crown and to the legislature, and popular endorsation through the electoral machinery and the political party. The peculiarities of cabinet government in Prince Edward Island lie not in the principles, but in the way some of the principles have been altered, sometimes almost beyond recognition, to meet local conditions and political expediencies, and in the occasional reversion to colonial practices which have long been considered extinct. These features are manifest in the Cabinet's composition, procedure, solidarity and responsibility, and judicial functions.

There is much talk in our time about freedom and economists have not been silent on the subject. It is apparent that in discussing the meaning and conditions of freedom they are moving beyond the limits of economics “proper” into the realm of political economy, which as O. H. Taylor has recently pointed out “… involves the latter [economic science] plus all other social or human sciences, plus philosophical, ethical and political reflection, plus thoughtful study of human history.” And since freedom involves value judgments, “ … is itself an ethical category …,” economics, in so far as economists concern themselves with freedom, cannot be regarded as a neutral science. There are deep waters here, deeper than many of freedom's advocates seem to realize. It is argued in this paper that while many economists writing about freedom will pay lip-service to the ideal of political economy as described by Professor Taylor, the strong tendency to remain economic scientists in thought and method is likely to produce in the end a flabbier economics and very little new light on freedom.

An approach very common in economic literature is to identify extremes of (i) freedom in thought and behaviour and (ii) authoritarian control, and then to suggest some happy middle way, preferably one which combines the “best” features of each. Freedom is identified with change, uncertainty and “progress” (these somehow identified with competition in free markets) and its absence with concentrations of power which threaten essential liberties. The problem appears to be that of reconciling liberty with stability, freedom of competition with an unseemly demand for security. To make the best of both worlds there must be some planning for stability, but not too much planning because it is so debilitating. Extremes must be avoided, some compromise sought; it is as simple as that.

We have already considered the election of a single candidate to represent a constituency. Now we turn to the problem of choosing the group of representatives who will best reflect the political opinions held throughout a country or constituency. The desirability of proportional representation, ceteris paribus, we take to be self-evident; a change in the electoral system that makes the legislative bodies more truly reflect the citizens' opinions will certainly be desirable, provided the party system and the system of cabinet government remain as effective after the change as they had been before. Of course, the source of difficulty, the opponents of proportional representation would add, is that when proportional representation is introduced other things do not remain the same: instead a degeneration of the party and cabinet system sets in.

These “dynamic changes” include alterations in party structure, a heightening or lessening of the political interest of the voters, alterations in the type of persons who stand for Parliament, new problems of cabinet formation, and increased or lesser control by the electorate over the course of government. And we readily concede that these are the aspects of the problem that it is most important to investigate to decide whether proportional representation would, in practice, do good or harm. The present paper will make no reference to them, and is not, indeed, much concerned to answer the broad question of whether proportional representation would, in any particular circumstances, be a good thing or a bad thing. A proper scientific procedure permits the treatment in isolation of particular aspects of each wider problem; and our concern is with the “statics” of the problem. (We only consider one or two small dynamic changes which are intimately connected with the course of the argument.)

The use of the term “territorial waters” herein is that generally applied in international law to the strip of water where the open sea washes the edge of the land territory of a state, within which strip the state has certain jurisdiction over its own nationals and those of other states. It does not include more extensive strips of water over which some states have asserted jurisdiction for certain purposes over their own nationals or in which, by treaty, adjoining states have asserted jurisdiction over the nationals of both.

There is no generally accepted rule of international law which may be regarded as universally applicable with respect to the right of dominion or jurisdiction over a particular belt of ocean adjacent to a country. It may be said at the beginning, however, that most countries have abandoned the old theory of Mare Clausum, under which coastal waters were sometimes fixed at sixty miles, one hundred miles, two days' journey, etc., from the shore, and under which claims were also made by agreement between two or more countries over an ocean common to them. In the decision of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague (1910), a member of the Tribunal referred to Selden's doctrine of Mare Clausum and to certain ancient treaties based upon it as “wild, obsolete claims over the common ocean which all nations have of old abandoned with the progress of an enlightened civilization.” In the early nineteenth century Russia claimed the Behring Sea as Mare Clausum. This was protested by Great Britain and the United States of America, and in treaties in 1824 and 1825 with the United States of America and Great Britain respectively, Russia recognized that “jurisdiction in the said Sea should be regarded as the reach of a cannon shot from the shore.” It may be of interest to note, however, that the theory is not entirely dead, for within even recent years Russia has applied it to the White Sea, with such effect that Norwegian sealing ships can no longer operate in this area.

There is already a good amount of scientific literature on the parish in French Canada. But this literature is almost exclusively concerned with the parish as it existed historically in the rural society of Quebec. Since the parochial structure was the main organizational frame of rural life and since the parish was identified with the local rural community, these studies have inevitably tended to be “community” monographs. The concept of the “parish” itself has been indiscriminately used to mean either an ecclesiastical structure, a type of social organization, an ecological unit, or a local social group.

The main intent of this paper is to offer a sociological clarification of the institutional nature of the parish. Our leading assumption is that the parish as an institution can be adequately understood only if it is, first of all, seen as an organizational element of the larger Catholic Church. Given this, one must start by analysing the essential features of the parish as it is conceived ideally by the Church. Having elucidated its ideal type as well as its written constitution, one can then evaluate more meaningfully the modalities of its functioning in varying concrete situations—its working constitution, as it were—and draw the line between its formal organization and the patterns of informal relationships that crystallize around it. Our analysis of the parish will be restricted to its structural aspects, viz. the established roles and the reciprocal hierarchical statuses which it implies, and this, in three main directions: the relationships of the parish official functionaries with their ecclesiastical superiors, with the members of the group within which they immediately operate, and with the total society. Only through such an approach can one succeed in our secondary purpose which is to compare the changes that the traditional parochial organization of rural French Canada has been undergoing in the new context of swiftly industrialized and socially heterogeneous cities. Since the larger part of the Canadian sociological literature on religion has been concerned with the non-institutional aspects of protest or erratic religious groups, such a study may bring a contribution to our knowledge of the social organizational value of established churches while incidentally also enabling us to re-focuss our theoretical thinking concerning social institutions.

If it be true that every generation selects and reads historical evidence in the light of its own aspirations and anxieties, one should expect one's contemporaries to take some interest in, and show sympathetic understanding for, periods of social stresses and strains. Having passed through three and a half decades of political and economic upheavals, and having little reason for believing that the time of troubles has come to an end, this generation is likely to feel some affinity with past epochs that appear to have suffered from similar symptoms of a deep-rooted social malaise. Perhaps the historian may derive some comfort from the knowledge that his age is not unique in having to contend with what, in moments of despair, appears to be an adverse trend of a secular nature.

At one time or another during his studies every economic historian must have come up against questions that should have shocked him into a realization of the vast methodological difficulties of his subject. If, as the theorists insist, inter-personal comparisons of utility are illegitimate, how can the historian justify his practice of using such concepts as group welfare? If he cannot form aggregates, how can he hope to be able to compare the wealth of nations at different times? But even assuming that such comparisons were possible: do we have properly defined criteria of economic growth and decline, or of prosperity and depression? And if not, are we entitled to use these and similar ill-defined terms for the purpose of characterizing and contrasting different periods of economic history?

This paper is concerned with the political theory developed by Major C. H. Douglas, the English founder and leader of the Social Credit movement, and not specifically with the ideas of the Canadian Social Credit movement, although the English theory has had a continuous, if not always a decisive, influence on the Canadian movement. Since the Douglas political theory stems from the Douglas social critique we shall begin with the latter.

The frustration of the engineer by the business control of industry may be seen as the starting point of Major Douglas's social thinking. Deeply impressed by the waste of industrial capacity and potential, Major Douglas developed a sweeping critique of industrial civilization. A man of broad sympathies and with a professional view of his engineering calling, he saw that whatever held back the progress of science in industry made it impossible for the technologist to serve the people and give them the benefit of their heritage. He saw further that the concentration of power in the control of industrial production was only a part of a trend toward concentration of power in government, in trade unions, and in every institution which affected the life and opportunity of every individual both as worker and consumer. In his earliest writings his main concern was to expose this trend toward the submergence of the individual, to establish its pervasive nature, and to warn that it must be defeated if the human quality of civilization was not to be destroyed. His case was presented with restraint and with telling effect. His recommendation of a monetary device, which later became commonly identified with social credit, as the most probable direction in which a solution might be found for freeing men from the tyranny of concentrated power, was also presented with restraint in the writings of the first few years, and was subordinated to the main analysis. His point was that men could not be free in any other way until they had secured a freedom of choice, both as producers and consumers, and a level of material well-being which the existing system of production and distribution denied them. The economic system must therefore first be reformed. Socialism was not the answer, since it would mean still further centralization of economic and political power. Monetary reform was the answer because it could destroy the mechanism by which economic power was being increased and by which the material well-being and the freedom of the individual were being diminished. Always Major Douglas presented monetary reform merely as a means toward the end of establishing a new society in which human beings would be free to develop their individuality in a way that had never been possible before.