« Dès que nous prétendons, écrivait un jour P.-H. Simon, découvrir au delà de nos désaccords, une ligne de convergence possible, nous sommes fatalement conduits à parler d'humanisme. Humanisme avec ce que le mot implique assez confusément de confiance dans l'espèce humaine, d'attachement à son passé, d'espérance en son progrès et de disposition à vouloir son bien, semble désigner le carrefour par où passent tous nos itinéraires spirituels… Seulement, quand on veut presser le sens du mot, on s'aperçoit que les difficultés demeurent. Humanisme est une de ces abstractions, dangereuses à force d'être commodes, où l'on peut tout mettre, Marx et l'Evangile, le libre examen et le sentiment de l'autorité, la tradition et la révolution. »

Cependant malgré l'infinie et souvent contradictoire variété des définitions que les auteurs ont jusqu'ici essayées de l'humanisme, il semble qu'on puisse clarifier un peu le sujet en les ramenant toutes à trois types principaux selon qu'on envisage l'humanisme comme philosophie des humanités, comme métaphysique de l'homme ou comme attitude humaine.

The poet Thomas Gray certainly did not have civil servants in mind when he penned the lines:

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure; …
Nor you, ye proud, impute to these the fault,
If Mem'ry o'er their tomb no trophies raise.

Nevertheless, his words seem to be a most fitting epitaph for those public servants who lived between 1840 and 1867 in the United Canadas. Our historians and sculptors have rescued most of our leading politicians from oblivion, but a great web of silence has been woven around the personalities and labours of our bureaucrats. It will be argued in this paper that this silence is quite unjustified. It will be argued further that this neglect of the civil service by our historians has resulted in the presentation of an incomplete picture of the attainment of responsible government in Canada. A third set of observations deals with the shadowy area dividing administration from politics, that is, dividing the ministerial head from his highest permanent advisers. Obviously this selection of topics is not designed to provide a comprehensive and complete survey of the state of our public services before Confederation. What follows is, rather, a series of impressions, deliberately undocumented, which are advanced as a basis for subsequent discussion.

Old age pensions of $40 a month became available on January 1, 1952, to every Canadian over seventy years of age, who had lived in the country for twenty years. As Canada has now had pensions for old people (subject to a means test) for only a quarter of a century, the idea is usually thought of as relatively new. In point of fact, however, Canadians were interested in old age security as far back as 1889, when the Royal Commission on the Relations of Labour and Capital mentioned with approval a French scheme to provide annuities for elderly workmen and their widows. The need for government action in the matter has been widely discussed in the Dominion ever since.

Great Britain's example in this, as in so many other matters, had an important influence. As early as 1773 a bill to provide annuities for “the industrious poor” had been passed by the House of Commons at Westminster, only to be rejected by the Lords. During the eighteen-eighties and nineties British enthusiasm for pensions for the aged revived, largely owing to Charles Booth. His monumental study of the Life and Labour of the People of London showed that some thirty per cent of the population of the metropolis lived in conditions of extreme poverty, because their earnings were not high enough to allow a decent standard of living, much less to make feasible any provision against old age. The government, Booth argued, ought under these circumstances to accept some responsibility for its elderly citizens.

The practice of criticizing political institutions on the basis of their efficiency as pieces of machinery is so widespread in political science today that it is sometimes difficult to remember that institutions may be as important for what they are as for what they do. An elected legislature, in its scrutiny of governmental affairs, not only represents the dominant sections of the electorate that returned it; it also reveals, through the nature of its own organization, their attitudes towards the elected legislature and its place in their society. An appraisal of the capacities and incapacities of a legislature would be at best incomplete if it paid no attention to the beliefs and traditions reflected therein, for it would ignore the obvious truth that the quality of the legislature's work was conditioned by its social environment. In the paragraphs that follow, the emphasis is not upon performance, although that is not overlooked, but upon the legislature as a social entity, as a mirror in which one can see an important part of a community.

The Canadian House of Commons during its early years offered the unusual and interesting spectacle of a legislature engaged in threshing out great issues while the legislative machinery itself was still under construction. Debates on important matters concerning the country at large ran parallel with acrimonious discussions about the nature and function of the House of Commons and its organization, and the government frequently tried (by providing, for instance, that each province was to obtain its due proportion of Commons' clerkships) to make the House a significant factor in the settling of disputes. Many institutions of the House (the speakership, the Hansard, and the Library, to name but a few) took their initial form as a result of forces which often bore little relation to legislation and debate.

The Canadian system of protective tariffs has long been known as the National Policy. Professor Underhill describes this designation as a stroke of genius. We gladly bow to the judgment of Professor Underhill, with one proviso, namely, that we may regard this description of the protective system as a stroke of political genius, and not necessarily as genius in the abstract and absolute. No one can doubt the political sagacity of the appeal made to the Canadian electorate in 1878 which claimed for the Conservatives an exclusive proprietary right to the formula for nation building. In retrospect we can readily recognize the contribution of the protective system to the creation of the Canadian nation. We are, nevertheless, by no means able to identify the protective system as the only nation-building instrument of the past century of Canadian history.

Professor Underhill does not, of course, attribute to Sir John A. Macdonald the genius which he finds implicit in the designation of the protective system as the National Policy. This indicates the exercise of proper caution, for it is clear that Macdonald displayed little originality in thus describing the tariff system. Many years ago Professor O. D. Skelton stressed the evolutionary nature of the concept of the National Policy and referred to the term as “a phrase which Rose devised, Hincks stamped with his approval, and Macdonald made current.”

Canada provides an interesting illustration of how far a system of government in practice may depart from the provisions of a legally valid constitution. Although in 1867 the British North America Act created a relatively centralized form of government, today, through changes wrought by geography, convention, and judicial decision, Canada's machinery of government is essentially federal in its operation. In other words, Canada has developed an “unwritten” constitution which goes far toward ensuring the independence of provincial governments in the exercise of exclusive powers. In one or two important respects, however, we find the federal character of Canadian government still somewhat in doubt. And it is by examining whether the existing system satisfies the essential requirements of federalism that the post-war developments in federal-provincial relations may be fruitfully analysed; by examining, that is to say, the extent to which these developments represent a movement towards or away from federalism.

Since World War II, Canada's constitutional system has been affected by three important changes: (1) federal-provincial financial arrangements have been radically revised; (2) the Supreme Court of Canada has been charged with the final interpretation of the constitution; and (3) the method of amending the constitution has been changed. It remains to record these developments in greater detail, and then to discuss their implications.

Until the Canadian dollar was raised to parity with the American dollar in July, 1946, Canadian foreign exchange reserves had been maintained at a satisfactory level by an inflow of capital which offset the substantial current account deficit with the United States. After the appreciation, which was undertaken to insulate the domestic price level from rising prices abroad, the capital flow was reversed and the official liquid reserves diminished rapidly until the end of 1947. The weakness in Canada's balance of payments position was caused by the fact that her surplus on current account was smaller than the rate at which her foreign loans were drawn down. The governmental policies undertaken to correct the balance of payments disequilibrium combined with a high level of national income in the United States to decrease the deficit in the current account with the United States and to replenish the reserves in 1948 and 1949.

The rapid increase in the merchandise deficit with the United States, evident in the first six months of 1951, and the declining rate of capital import pointed to the possibility of a deterioration in Canada's foreign exchange position. It is thus opportune to examine the effect of the policies followed by the Canadian government in its attempt to deal with the balance of payments disequilibrium of 1947. An attempt is made in this paper to discover how much these policies, especially import controls, contributed to the solution of the problem.

There is a famous admonition in Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France: “Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that, of course, they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little, shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour.” Thomas Spence, William Ogilvie, and Thomas Paine, whom I have chosen to call the English agrarians and with whose ideas this paper is concerned, were among those whom Burke dismissed in this manner. I believe he did them less than justice. It is true that while Paine has achieved a stature considerably greater than that of “an insect of the hour,” Spence and Ogilvie remain names–unknown names at that–on a crowded roster of minor political thinkers; and in presuming to advance their status, I bear in mind the comment of a reviewer who has referred to the interest “shown in the words and speeches of millenarian pamphleteers, who are often bloated into veritable Platos or premature Marxes.” I hope to avoid the pitfall of exaggeration. Yet I am convinced they merit more attention than they have hitherto received if only because they, alone among their contemporaries, recognized the outstanding social and economic problem of their time and made it the starting-point of their speculation.

Our present social sciences, with their concepts of “culture” and “personality,” have made us vividly aware of the interrelatedness of the particular aspects of human behaviour in societies. It comes no longer as a surprise that religion and economic expansiveness are interconnected.

In his famous study, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber developed the idea that ascetic Protestantism in some way prepared the way for the calculating spirit of modern, rational capitalism. Here an ideal factor was regarded as an independent variable in history. Although the main thesis has found fairly general acceptance, important criticisms have been levelled at particular points of Weber's essay. While Weber demonstrated the affinity between such ideas as the religiously coloured “calling” and “innerworldly asceticism,” and the more utilitarian and secular economic ideas of later times (Franklin), he did not carefully analyse the precise nature of the influence of the earlier ideas. For that purpose, a detailed study of the economic structure of early modern Europe would have been necessary, and, at least within The Protestant Ethic, Weber abstained from such a study.

This paper is concerned with the “General Possibility Theorem” of Dr. K. J. Arrow. Since the theorem is certainly elegant and probably important, it is proper as well as convenient to refer to it from this point on as Arrow's theorem. The theorem deals with the problem of discovering a rule by which social preferences can be constructed from individual preferences. Such a rule, or social welfare function, gives a social ordering of alternatives of any kind for every possible arrangement of the corresponding individual orderings. Arrow's theorem declares that no social welfare function exists that satisfies those conditions that most of us would consider essential to a satisfactory rule. The outcome is something of a shock to preconceptions.

In what follows two aspects of Arrow's theorem are considered. In the early part of the paper the theorem as such is examined. A brief and informal statement of Arrow's argument is followed by a formal statement of the conditions on which the argument depends. A proof of the theorem is offered that seems to be rather more naturally constructed than the original. A set of conditions is proposed (derived from Arrow's proof) that is weaker than the original set, that seems to be at least as plausible, and that leads to the same conclusion by a short and direct route. In the later part of the paper, methods of circumventing the theorem (there seems to be no way of removing it) are explored.

No topic has evoked so much discussion in all parts of Great Britain, and indeed in the world outside, as the Labour Party's programme to nationalize 20 per cent of the economy. Nationalization is recognized by all as the most important domestic issue facing the nation because the industries brought under public ownership are vital to Britain's economic recovery at home and a key to her future role in foreign affairs. As the Conservatives will continue the programme as conceived by Labour, except in the case of the iron and steel industry which will probably be returned to private ownership, an analysis of British nationalization is as pertinent today as it was during the Labour Party's tenure in office.

The Labour Party defined its nationalization plan in a 1945 electoral document titled Let Us Face the Future which stated in part:

There are basic industries ripe and over-ripe for public ownership and management in the direct service of the nation. There are many smaller businesses rendering good service which can be left to go on with their useful work.

There are big industries not yet ripe for public ownership which must nevertheless be required by constructive supervision to further the nation's needs and not to prejudice national interests by restrictive anti-social monopoly or cartel agreements, caring for their own capital structures and profits at the cost of a lower standard of living for all.

The theory of prices developed by Keynes in the General Theory is always likely to appeal strongly to the student approaching the subject from the side of value theory for in his analysis customary supply-demand categories are reaffirmed. Yet, despite its insights, his analysis here is incomplete: although there is a fairly detailed account of the supply curve the chapter is vague on the exact composition of the corresponding demand function. This paper reviews the problem, constructs an appropriate demand-supply apparatus, and uses it to analyse the determination of the price level of consumer goods, as measured by index numbers. It appears, however, that the same technique can be extended to explain the price level of investment goods if certain of the functional connections are modified.

The essential distinction between the analysis of the firm (or industry) and the analysis of the economy is that in the former supply and demand can be regarded as independent, whereas in the latter interdependence must be stressed from the very beginning. Causally, however, it is usually argued that the initial impetus comes from the supply side. Factors are viewed as being paid for by reason of entrepreneurial decisions to hire them for productive uses, and resource owners as thereafter expending these earnings, in whole or in part, on the forthcoming consumer good output. Viewing this as the essential proposition descriptive of the economic process, let us develop its implications for the theory of the price level.

Multiple-employer collective bargaining includes all systems of bargaining in which representatives of a number of separate firms act as a group in negotiating with representatives of their workers. The group negotiations need not cover the whole content of the contracts signed by the participating companies, nor does the group action necessarily extend from negotiation to administration of the collective bargaining contract. The employers' bargaining unit may be of any size. Industry-wide bargaining is only one form of multiple-employer bargaining; characteristics of multiple-employer bargaining are also present, although sometimes less pronounced, in local or district bargaining systems.

A significant proportion of the collective bargaining systems in Canada are organized on a multiple-employer basis. The Department of Labour estimated that in 1946, 26 per cent of all workers under collective agreements were covered by agreements negotiated by associations or groups of employers. The ratio would be 46 per cent if workers covered by agreements extended under the Collective Agreement Act of Quebec were included. The relative importance of multiple-employer collective bargaining is probably much the same today.

During the period 1921-5 Canada's upswing was generally less intense than those abroad and the consequent sharp rise of merchandise exports relative to imports rendered the current account balance on the whole progressively less passive or more active. During the period 1926-9, on the other hand, Canada's upswing was more intense, for the most part, than those abroad; and the resulting relative rise of merchandise imports made the current account balance progressively less active or more passive. This rise of the current account to a peak in 1925 and its continuous fall thereafter was the dominant characteristic of Canada's international accounts during the upswing, the current account balance being the major independent variable. During the years 1922-5 when Canada was ostensibly on the paper standard all the expected short-run adjusting forces were generally in operation. Similarly the short-run adjusting forces expected under gold standard conditions were found in the main in the 1926-9 period. The major adjusting force in both halves of the upswing was the equilibrating movement of long-term capital, in response mainly to differences in the speed of business expansion at home and abroad. Thus the major disturbing factor in Canada's international accounts, the current account, and the major equilibrating factor, long-term capital movements, seem to have had a common cyclical origin. However, adjustment was incomplete in the first half of the upswing, despite primary and secondary (multiplier-accelerator) income effects and favourable price changes–partly because of the contraction of bank loans and the changes in income distribution.

Potentially, the most complete and accurate information concerning any broad class of law-violators is obtainable from statistics on inmates of penitentiaries. This is true because the longer term of the penitentiary convict makes possible a correspondingly more intensive study of his characteristics than can be made for the offender concerning whom we have only the information provided by the police, the courts, or the municipal jails.

The research upon which this report is based grew out of an interest in evaluating, at least partially, the extent to which one major recommendation of the so-called “Archambault Report” has been implemented. The pertinent recommendation stressed “the need for formulating definite policies in regard to the compilation of statistics and definite principles of gathering such statistics which would be observed by all authorities throughout Canada.” More concretely, it recommended (p. 174) that “there should be a close cooperation between the [Department of Justice, Penitentiaries Branch] … and the [Dominion] Bureau of Statistics, with a view to formulating definite policies….” The major statistical section (forming the Appendix) of the Annual Report of the Commissioners of Penitentiaries, is a direct result of the foregoing recommendation.

Before World War I a relatively high degree of regional specialization in the production of agricultural commodities had developed throughout the world, and the Canadian prairies had turned to the production of wheat. During the 1920's this structure of regional specialization was seriously undermined and the depression of the 1930's brought disaster to many specialized regions, including the Canadian prairies. Two significant conditions upon which the settlement of the prairies had been premised, relative freedom of trade and an upward trend in the population of Occidental countries, were altered adversely. When, in addition, a series of droughts afflicted the prairies during the 1930's, the economic plight of the region became nothing short of desperate. Its inhabitants felt that they had been “let down” by their own federal government and by the world in general, and they protested in a variety of ways. In Alberta, a dynamic leader spearheaded the Social Credit movement which captured the provincial government, attempted to set up a provincial monetary system, and defaulted on the provincial government debt.

This study of urban building and real estate activity in Canada is concerned primarily with housing. It is part of a broader project stimulated by Silberling's thesis that among the various components of durable capital formation in the United States only investment in housing and in transportation have acted as prime movers determining the general level of economic activity. This paper falls into two parts, the first dealing with the nature of building and real estate cycles in selected cities in Canada, and the second relating these fluctuations to the growth and movement of population. Basic tables and brief notes on sources are included in an appendix.

The top section of Chart 1 is an index of urban building activity in Canada from 1866 to 1946. This index reflects four and a half major cycles in the eighty years since the Dominion was established. The cycles are similar in many respects to those found by American students. This Canadian index, like those used to illustrate the long cycles in American building, is based on building permits issued in major cities, and has been adjusted to eliminate the influence of changes in the cost of construction. Table I compares upper and lower turning points in the index with those reflected in Mr. J. R. Riggleman's index of deflated values of urban building permits per capita in the United States.

Although philanthropy has been important in many societies, it is safe to say that it has never played such a prominent role, nor become such an elaborate part of the social structure, as it has in twentieth-century North America. Much has been written on it, particularly in recent years, and many reasons have been given for its development, but there has been little scientific analysis of it as a social activity, nor interest in its relations to the social order. The purposes of this paper are threefold: to trace the development of organized philanthropy since the beginning of the century in a Canadian city, here called Wellsville; to analyse how the philanthropic pattern has become elaborated and integrated into the structure of the community; and to assess the function which this organized activity fulfils for both the individual and various groups in the community.

Before the twentieth century, philanthropy in Canada was a haphazard affair, and except for the few individual donors who occasionally gave large sums of money for the cause of religion, health, or education, “giving” was mainly confined to the poor and indigent. Today vast sums of money are continuously being raised by the combined efforts of large numbers of voluntary collectors for an infinite number of purposes. Thus in a relatively short period of time “giving,” once the prerogative of the pious and wealthy, has become part of the common experience of a large proportion of the population of any modern city or large town. With the increase in giving has come the increased participation of many people in the actual work of collecting money through the media of highly organized, money-raising campaigns.

The interrelationship of costs of production, profit, and output of a firm is a central problem of modern economic analysis. This problem has been so far conceived and investigated chiefly for a free market economy. The corresponding analysis of the equilibrium of a firm under the conditions of perfect and imperfect competition represents the first stage of what is known under the name of “the theory of value.” This analysis is a joint contribution of economists of many countries and a cornerstone of modern economics.

The parallel problem in a nationalized industry subject to complete government control (the problem of the interrelationship between controlled costs of production, controlled profit, and planned output) has so far escaped the attention of analytical economists. This gap in analysis is due partly to the fact that the dogmatic treatment of central planning in the hands of political writers has induced some authors to believe that central planning and nationalization succeed in abolishing this important problem altogether. Outputs are believed to be determined by targets and hence to be independent of profit considerations. In addition, some economists have been led to believe that the tools of modern economic theory in general, and the intellectual apparatus of the theory of value in particular, are inappropriate for dealing with what are believed to be problems of administration rather than economic problems proper.