Every well-bred economist knows that a man named Adam Smith was born at Kirkcaldy in 1723, published a somewhat notable book in 1759 entitled The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and in 1776, when he was fifty-three years old, produced an extraordinary pair of volumes called An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Most young economists nowadays, I fear, do not read either work of the great Scotsman as we all once did—in the days when one could still take time to enjoy also the leisurely pace of Thackeray and Dickens, even Scott. Students who just skim the Wealth of Nations, or parts of it, would surely miss what has attracted my attention; and even scholars interested in Smith's economic principles would hardly perceive what I have in mind, namely, that he was noteworthy for his “unbounded benevolence,” as one near-contemporary described him, and that he was “slow to think evil” as a recent biographer alleges.

Apparently it was out of this abounding good nature that Smith alluded to “the avarice and injustice of princes and sovereign states, abusing the confidence of their subjects”; that he took opportunity to mention “the conveyances of a verbose attorney”; and that, with a more sweeping serenity, he recorded an observation of “the over-weening conceit which the greater part of men have of their own abilities.”

Biographers of Smith have been led to state that perhaps he was not as obviously religious as some of his contemporaries. He was perhaps a deist, even if he was a philosopher and a friend of Hume. John Rae reported that Smiths “opening prayers” at Glasgow were thought to “savour strongly of natural religion,” and occasioned no little shaking of heads. Perhaps, then, one might expect Smith to have been somewhat less charitable toward wearers of the cloth than he was toward other groups.

While more than half of the world's population is still confronted by the “Malthusian menace” of poverty, hunger, and disease, Canadians have been able to enjoy a steadily rising level of well-being. The phenomenal expansion of the Canadian economy has not only facilitated improvements in the general standard of living, but has also given impetus to significant demographic changes in this country.

Contrary to the “predictions” made by some demographers, the pre-war downward trend in fertility was reversed in the early years of the Second World War, and a “baby boom” set in, in Canada as elsewhere. Even after the boom had subsided in most other countries and their birth rates had shown a sign of swinging back to the pre-war level, Canada's growth in population continued to gather momentum. Sustained high fertility, steadily declining mortality, and resumption of immigration on a substantial scale following the war have resulted in an impressive enlargement of Canada's human resources. Shifts in vital trends and in immigration in recent years have also modified the structure of the Canadian population. Furthermore, advances in industrial technology and consequent alterations in the utilization of manpower have stimulated a large-scale geographical and occupational redistribution of the population. The trend toward a decrease in population in the farm areas, a heavy influx of migrants into metropolitan centres, and the suburban development of some of the oldest cities of the country are but manifestations of demographic response to social and economic changes occurring in present-day Canada.

An earlier paper examined changes in Canadian sensitivity to United States business fluctuations. The evidence suggested that this sensitivity may have declined from the ten years preceding the First World War to the twenties, and that it undoubtedly declined between the twenties, on the one hand, and the thirties and post-war period on the other. Changes in sensitivity were measured by changes in the average percentage amplitude of fluctuations in Canadian output indicators associated with given percentage fluctuations of the corresponding United States indicators. The changes in sensitivity observed in this way were very small, but the decline from the twenties to the thirties and the post-war period was statistically significant.

The present paper attempts an explanation of these findings by examining changes in structural factors that can be assumed to have influenced Canada's cyclical sensitivity. Most of these factors have been frequently discussed by Canadian economists.

Since exports are a major channel for the transmission of cyclical fluctuations (indeed, in the thinking of many economists they appear to be the only channel), and since United States business conditions influence, directly and indirectly, Canadian exports to all countries, the sensitivity of total Canadian exports to United States business fluctuations must be examined. Since the United Kingdom has been a major market for exports, the influence of its business fluctuations on the relation between United States and Canadian fluctuations is also relevant.

Responsible government, as Professor Hodgetts has demonstrated convincingly in his Pioneer Public Service, means more than that the political life of the executive depends on the support of a majority of the members of the elected legislature. Behind the executive, government departments must be so organized that the ministers can exercise a control for which they can be held responsible. The issuance of public money to pay for departmental activities must be under a central authority, and so must a thorough audit of expenditures. The public accounts must be intelligible to the laymen who sit in Parliament, and a system of estimating in advance the needs of government for each ensuing year is indispensable. “Each of these aspects of internal financial control,” in Professor Hodgetts' words, “… had to be satisfactorily developed if Parliament was to become the watchdog of the executive.” They were satisfactorily developed between 1840 and Confederation, some of them as late as the middle sixties.

Partly because several of the political and administrative practices involved were still in their infancy, and partly because Confederation meant the destruction of old lines of authority and the creation of new ones, a severe strain was put on several essential elements in responsible government in 1867. The administrative side of the story, as it concerned governmental financial control, has already been told by Herbert Balls, but the legislative side has hitherto been neglected. The legislative story, not only in its financial aspect but also in the wider context of the whole parliamentary scene, is worth recounting.

Vast changes have been wrought in the British governmental machinery during the past quarter-century—alterations in scope, structure, and administrative procedures made necessary in part by the rigours of economic depression and war and further intensified by the demands of an emerging welfare state. Of these changes one of the more significant has been the development by the central government departments of a complex and intricate system of regional organization to decentralize many of their more important functions. Today “administrative regionalism” characterizes the administration of fifteen major government departments. On January 1, 1956, 16,318 non-industrial civil servants (the national total was 636,771) were stationed outside Whitehall in regional offices established in eleven “regional capitals” and were working (with minor exceptions) in uniform geographical areas in accordance with established government policy. Several hundreds of thousands of the other civil servants were employed in local offices, such as post offices, employment exchanges, national insurance offices, pensions offices, district works offices, and so on. Some departments have regional offices and local offices; others have regional offices only.

Decentralization of national programmes is unavoidable if governmental machinery is to function at all effectively. This is true not only in democracies, but also in countries under authoritarian rule, such as the Soviet Union. The administrative problems encountered in the decentralization of governmental functions are many. The purpose of this article is to examine Britain's experience in order to secure answers to a number of important questions. Why has it been necessary for the British to establish a system of regional administration? To what extent can the responsibilities of a national government be decentralized? What form does such decentralization take—policy formation, or administration and execution, or both? What type of administrative organization has been developed on the regional level? How is the work of a particular ministry in each of the eleven regions co-ordinated and to what degree have procedures been devised for standardizing work programmes throughout the country? Within a given region, how are matters that concern two or more departments dealt with?

One of the marching songs of the labour movement on this continent is “Solidarity Forever!” But in Canada, its exhortation has sometimes been more honoured in the breach than in the observance. At intervals over the last half-century and more, Canadian trade unionism has been “by schisms rent asunder, by heresies distrest.” In 1902, the Trades and Labor Congress of Canada (T.L.C.) threw out the Knights of Labor and national unions which were “dual” to international unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (A.F.L.). The twenty-three expelled organizations promptly formed the National Trades and Labour Congress. In 1908, this became the Canadian Federation of Labour, a name which has kept cropping up in Canadian labour history ever since. In 1919, just after the Winnipeg strike, and partly as a result of it, a considerable number of western unionists left the T.L.C. to form the One Big Union (O.B.U.). Between 1901 and 1921, small local Roman Catholic unions sprang up in the province of Quebec, and in 1921 these formed the Canadian and Catholic Confederation of Labour (C.C.C.L.). In 1927, the Canadian Federation of Labour and other national unions formed the All-Canadian Congress of Labour (A.C.C.L.). In 1936, some of the officers of the A.C.C.L. seceded to form the present Canadian Federation of Labour, which is no longer even mentioned in the Department of Labour's annual Report on Labour Organization in Canada (and has not been since the 1950–1 edition), and which the orthodox union movement never considered a genuine labour organization at all. (About ten years ago, a secession from the Canadian Federation of Labour formed the National Council of Canadian Labour, which —in spite of its grandiose title, and the faint air of respectability imparted to it by inclusion in the Department of Labour's report, which gives it 42 locals and 5,640 members—is also beyond the pale of orthodox unionism.) In 1939, the executive of the T.L.C. suspended the Canadian unions affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (C.I.O.) in the United States. These unions formed a Canadian C.I.O. Committee.

For most of the past century an expansion of secondary industry has been taking place in Ontario. During most of this period, however, the process of industrialization has been quite gradual, somewhat intermittent, and often fairly closely related to agriculture. Such was only to be expected so long as the general economic expansion of the country was centred in agriculture and particularly in the development of the agricultural resources of the Prairie Provinces. In recent years, however, the general expansion has been concentrated in the non-agricultural sectors of the economy. Moreover a very large part of the total activity has been occurring in the province of Ontario and at an extremely rapid rate. It is because there has been so much industrial development in so short a time that the impact on agriculture has been so pronounced.

In considering the specific ways in which agriculture has been affected it may first be noted that the industrial expansion has meant a pronounced and continuous increase in non-farm employment at steadily rising wage-rates. The ability to obtain these new well-paid jobs has made it possible for many people to improve their economic lot by shifting from farming to other occupations. It has also forced farmers to choose between paying much higher wages (and also providing greatly improved working and living conditions for hired workers) and finding some less expensive method of getting work done. It has also led to the abandonment of farms in numerous cases where, because of factors such as inferior soil, insufficient area, or poor location, continuance in farming had depended on the ability to obtain cheap labour.

A preliminary report is by definition an unsatisfying document, though it may be an exciting one. The Gordon Commission's Preliminary Report qualifies for the former description, without quite coming up to the latter; for while the prospects of economic growth which it holds out are gratifying in the extreme, its discussion of policy problems is narrowly empirical and pragmatic, uninspired by any consistent philosophy of resource-orientated growth or even of economic policy, and interesting mainly as a reflection of trends in Canadian political opinion and the balance of pressure groups at the end of the second Liberal era.

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 is documented in two books published in the spring and summer of last year. The first is a comprehensive collection of speeches, documents, radio reports, and newspaper articles arranged chronologically to trace the uprising from its first stirrings in the Petofi Circle and the Literary Gazette to its prolonged and anguished death under the Kadar repression. Its method is impressionistic, designed to convey the hope, determination, uncertainty, and desperation of the participants in two weeks of national revolution, and to “observe a revolution and a war with a thousand eyes” (p. 7). It succeeds in transmitting the mood of the revolution by careful editing of the selections, many of them eloquent and impassioned; and it develops a much more complete picture of the revolt than most North Americans could imagine from newspaper and radio reports during the uprising. It leaves many questions unanswered, and some unasked; the editor, Melvin J. Lasky, presents die collection with its ambiguities unresolved. He does not attempt to draw his own conclusions from the incomplete evidence that he has collected. The book does, as the editor hopes, tell the story of the tragedy with directness and sympathy. It implies more than it says.