No one can deny that the present struggle is one of the most profound and certainly the most far-reaching in the recorded history of the world. There is not a corner of the globe, civilized or uncivilized, that will not see the effects of it in the everyday life of every man, woman, and child. The outcome will affect every one of us as it will even the native tribes of Africa and Borneo.

We, on our side, are usually said to be defenders of democracy against the foe of totalitarianism. We usually define our position as the maintenance of democracy. But I think we are defending something more fundamental and even more important than democracy. Democracy may be the form of government best suited for that defence. We think so, and we are maintaining it for that reason. But this democracy is only the means—we hope and trust it is the best means yet found—of ensuring something far deeper and far more important than this democracy itself. That something is the sacred right of a man to be a man. It is not the fashion any more to speak of the “rights of man,” but nevertheless, under whatever new name we put it, it is that for which we have always fought, for which we must fight now, and for which we shall have to fight in the future. Under totalitarianism the state is all and man is nothing. Every member of the state is moved from above. He has no rights, not even the right to his own thoughts if they could be known. It is a system of compulsion and terror, of force and of despotic power. It is only half the story, then, if we say we are fighting for democracy-it is far less than half of it. We are fighting for the right to be men, and we are fighting against a despotic form of government which denies us that right. To put this more concretely, we are struggling for limitations of despotic will, to secure our freedom as individuals in all those things in which this freedom does not encroach on that of others. We are battling for limited government and against unlimited governmental authority; for we want government to leave some corners of our life to ourselves in which we may speak and act and worship as we please. In short, we do not want citizenship to be a synonym for slavery. If democracy is likely to secure this, then we are for democracy; but freedom is far more precious than self-government, and self-government must prove itself able to maintain that freedom or it may turn out to be a failure. So I should prefer to call our present world struggle rather a struggle to maintain constitutionalism than a mere struggle for democracy. It is a life and death fight to maintain some limits to arbitrary will; it is a contest between will and law. Totalitarianism rests on the assumption that some men or some races are by nature so much better than all others that the good of the whole requires that these men or these races alone shall rule and shall regulate the lives of all the rest as slaves. The present connection in Germany between totalitarianism and the tribal myth of German superiority is by no means an accident. Some such myth, even one as fantastic and historically false as this, must be assumed if total domination is ever to be justified. This is why I have ventured to give the title of constitutionalism rather than democracy to the opposition to totalitarianism about which I propose to make some rambling remarks.

It may be thought that to give consideration now to the possibility of democratic government in a totalitarian world is an idle task. Whether there is to be a future for democracy rests in far more capable and determined hands than ours, and it may seem that there is little we can do beyond cheering on our defenders, assuring them of our confidence in their victory, and consolidating for them a whole-hearted support on the home front. In these perilous days there is a temptation for us to regard it as an impertinence to take stock of our position while the issue is still in the balance. The importance of action is so great that we tend to turn from the contemplation of ends and objectives to concentration upon the effective means of execution, to those practical arts appropriate for the mechanized warfare of an industrialized age. In a similar period of war and strife, even Milton, the great defender of the spoken word and printed page, could also renounce the “inglorious arts of peace,” proclaiming:

'Tis time to leave the books in dust And oil the unused armour's rust.

Yet, as we look back to the civil war of the eighteenth century, there are two things which should give us pause. One is that for Milton a long period of thought had settled in his mind certain firm convictions of the issue at stake and the direction which action should take. And secondly, even more important, is the serious doubt that Milton must have had later regarding the wisdom of the policy being taken by the man of action, Cromwell, whose praises he had sung. Was the establishment of the Protectorate the object which the Puritans and Parliamentarians had in mind? Evidently not. Was it not Milton himself who declared in dismay that “presbyter” is but “priest” writ large? Must he not secretly have considered that “Protector” was but “Prince” writ large, too?

It is an old and well-worn charge, now re-enforced by the emergence of the totalitarian state, that democratic governments are essentially inefficient. They are especially alleged to be slow in decision, cumbersome in movement, uncertain and unduly deliberate in execution, these faults tending to become much more pronounced when the increased stresses of war make effective action imperative. But the validity of so sweeping a criticism may easily be questioned, although it is, up to a point, undoubtedly justified. For once that point is passed and a democracy is fully seized of the seriousness of the emergency, it may develop reserves of power which have been hitherto unsuspected, and display a political resourcefulness which will enable it to mould and adapt its institutions to the novel demands made upon them. Such, at least, was the experience during the last world war, and such seems to be the trend of events during the present war also. From this point of view, a survey of the Canadian effort during the past eighteen months discloses something more than the struggle of the Dominion to win the war. It also furnishes an interesting illustration of both the flexibility of democratic government and the nature of the devices which a democracy may utilize without entirely sacrificing the ideas of responsibility and popular control.

In the early months of the present war the Dominion of Canada moved, in the language of the English Chancery, “with all deliberate speed.” The original idea, generally held and frequently expressed, was that the war could be fought in rather leisurely fashion, that Canada could participate and at the same time limit the extent of her efforts. This seems, at least, to have been the hope of most of the people, derived partly from their own inclination, partly from the attitude of their government, and partly also by contagion from the lukewarm Chamberlain administration in Great Britain. Canadian Ministers visited England and British officials came to Canada, and all professed to be quite satisfied with the progress of events, awaiting with some complacency the slow economic starvation of Germany as an inevitable consequence of Allied encirclement. Unhappily Germany had other ideas. The disasters of last spring brought a violent awakening, and were susceptible of but one interpretation: the issue became thenceforth a simple one-win or perish.

Federalism is not the least of interests shared by Canada and the United States. The elements of likeness and unlikeness exist in a balance that makes comparison profitable, although such comparison is allowed to remain implicit in the following survey of trends in the United States. To discuss in Canada the federalism of another country, of course, is to carry to Newcastle the ashes of its own coals, so greatly are all federal systems in debt to the monumental inquiry of the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations. No similar focus yet enlightens the analysis of federal problems in the United States.

The temper of the United States is incorrigibly one of contrivance. The brevity of the constitution leaves it essentially unwritten. Of the obstacles of the formal amending process, of course, it can no longer quite be said, as Frank J. Goodnow put the matter in 1911, that “the constitution of the United States is, on account of the complicated procedure and the large majorities required, very difficult, if not impossible, of amendment under ordinary conditions.” After forty-three years without an amendment, six have been ratified since 1913. But the habit of relying on adjustment by interpretation is deep. The Supreme Court controversy in 1937 would have found the country at a loss to suggest just how it would amend the Constitution if the discussion as a practical matter had taken that turn. Students of government are sometimes irked by the atmosphere that takes for granted the necessity of advance by accommodation; mostly, however, their lives are spent on detailed inquiries that merely deepen the assumption. In recent years the impact of events abroad has challenged them to identify and to reaffirm the fundamentals of popular government. But the effect of these events has been to throw the United States back upon its constitutional tradition. The mood will last, it is admitted, only so long as there is movement and vigour. Never has the constitutional system of the United States been more fluent. Paradoxically, this condition encourages the survival of the old reliance on piecemeal adaptation.

All federal systems of government have been subjected to severe strain in recent years. It is not Canada alone that has felt the onslaught of economic and social change. The German federation went down before the Nazi tidal wave. The Australian federation was hard put to it to weather its difficulties in the early thirties. The United States of America, the greatest of them all, has been through continuous rack and strain in the past decade. What the permanent ravages of depression and the New Deal on the federal structure will be is as yet far from clear. The devices of navigation to which the national and state governments have been driven are described by some as the rise of a new federalism to meet the challenge of new conditions and by others as the destruction of the independence of the states. Observers in the other countries concerned are equally at variance in their interpretations, except, of course, in Germany where the results are fairly conclusive. There have been so many bad guesses in predicting political trends in the past few years that the prudent will hesitate to lay bets. But the nature of the predicament which generates strain in federal systems has become sufficiently clear that the main elements can be outlined with some confidence.

Political science has not yet advanced, if indeed it ever will, to the stage where accurate measure of contemporary forces is possible; much less can it be used to predict the future. Since I deal with both the present and the future my remarks are largely a venture in political speculation rather than a discourse on political science. But I make no apology for the subject. Canada faces a difficult and dangerous future. It is our primary duty as citizens of a democracy to face the stark realities of the present crisis, and to attempt as best we can to assess this significance for our country. It is particularly the duty of those of us who by reason of our vocation can snatch time for leisured thought amid a world given over to violent action.

In the quiet days before Munich we were wont to classify Canadians who had anything to say about the external policy of their country as “imperialists,” “collectivists,” “isolationists,” or “traditionalists.” Few, if any, Canadians fitted neatly into these pigeon-holes, but the classification was convenient for distinguishing between different trends or schools of thought. But whether these were possible alternatives of policy in the pre-Munich days, it is obvious that they no longer have much validity. We have passed from the apparently static world of the twenty years' armistice to the dynamic world of the present. In war there can be only one foreign policy and that the vigorous prosecution of the war. In the post-war world our freedom of choice may be scarcely less limited.