It is with some misgiving that I put forward the suggestion that a Canadian may be in a better position than either an Englishman or an American—despite the experience of the former, the energy of the latter, and the assurance of both—to appreciate the complex problems of under-developed countries. Nevertheless, emboldened by the modest, freely admitted and unhesitating recognition (by Canadians) of Canada's success in the historic role of interpreting the United States to Great Britain and Great Britain to the United States, and undeterred by the somewhat less striking evidence of our capacity to interpret ourselves to one another within the framework of a federal state, I am ambitious to extend the operations of such an honest broker of goodwill to include a more racially variegated, linguistically diversified, and culturally challenging clientele.

The credentials which a Canadian may offer in asking to be considered as a possible interpreter of at least some of the problems of under-developed countries cannot be brushed aside as completely fraudulent. As an expert on under-developed countries has pointed out, “one might almost say that a country is ‘underdeveloped,’ if its government considers development a problem, in a way which calls for positive policy. In this sense, Canada would have been an underdeveloped country throughout the nineteenth century, and might even be considered so to-day, despite its high per capita income and its current rate of economic growth.” Certainly if one of the more important criteria of an under-developed country is a heavy reliance on foreign capital for economic development, Canada may still be looked upon as an underdeveloped country subject to many of the stubborn political and social, no less than economic, problems and frictions which such a position involves.

The historian's understanding of past situations benefits greatly from the fact that he, unlike any contemporary observer, knows a good deal about the subsequent development. It is only in retrospect, if at all, that germinal forces, unnoticed or underestimated at the time, can be seen in their true significance. However, hiridsight also has its dangers. Reading history backwards we are easily misled into postulating specific “antecedents” and “early phases” of phenomena which seem to require a long period of gestation; and we are almost inclined to distrust our records if they fail to confirm our expectations.

It is well to be on guard against this temptation when trying to appraise the general character of the closing years of the seventeenth, and the early decades of the eighteenth century. Certainly, as far as the demographic situation of this period is concerned, there was little if anything to herald the impending changes. Man was still very much at the mercy of the elements. As late as the 1690's a succession of poor and indifferent harvests created severe subsistence crises in almost all countries of Europe. So far from growing, the population declined here and there, as dearth and starvation stalked through the lands from Castile to Finland, and from the Scottish Highlands to the foothills of the Alps. In 1698, after a serious crop failure, certain regional death rates in Sweden are known to have risen to 9 and 16 per cent respectively.

The British North America Act is usually considered to go no further in guaranteeing fundamental rights than to provide some protection for the French Canadians of Quebec with respect to their peculiar property and social institutions, for Protestant and Catholic minorities in the provision of educational facilities, and for English and French minorities in the use of their languages. Yet subsection 26 of section 91, which authorized the Dominion Parliament and not the provincial legislatures to enact laws on divorce, was no less a protective device. For, as Georges Etienne Carrier pointed out in Parliament in 1870, the Protestants of Quebec would have been unable to secure divorces if the granting of them had been left to the legislatures, since the legislature of Quebec would not have established a court for that purpose or permitted them by special bills. According to Carrier, the bishops of his Church had accepted the subsection relating to divorce because Canada was a mixed community; he hoped, however, that, when Catholics petitioned for divorce, Protestant members of Parliament would remember that the provision was intended for Protestants. The inference was that Parliament was to give different treatment to petitioners of different religious faiths.

There are names in English history—Pym and Cromwell, Walpole and Pitt, Cobbett and Gladstone—that sum up in themselves the supreme embodiment of the English character. Mr. Churchill belongs indisputably to that great company. He has symbolized in his person the characteristics that have become known as English since the Henrican Reformation. In a fantastically varied lifetime he has moved from one role to another with all the calm assurance of the aristocrat-politician for whom occupation has been not so much a necessary vocation as a high adventure to be sought out. In each of the roles he has displayed ability and genius sufficient to endow half a dozen reputable careers. If to his English ancestry he owes his natural aptitude for affairs and a grand style of entering upon them, to his American background he owes his flair for self-advertisement and his genius for the melodramatic. He has managed to personify the national hero-figure of John Bull in much the same way as Lincoln, with the aid of the able cartoonist Thomas Nast, came to embody the American symbol of Uncle Sam. He has personified homo anglicanus: a being with all kinds of crotchety prejudices, frequently wrong in his opinions, rarely mean in his battles, suspicious of general ideas, with admiration for the courage that stands up for what it believes in and with no pity for the weakness that cringes, possessed of a capacity to be curiously sentimental and passionately angry.

Toward the end of Louis Hémon's novel Maria Chapdelaine, which is perhaps the work most representative of traditional French Canadianism, one finds this lyrical passage: “… in the country of Quebec, nothing has changed. Nothing will change, because we are a testimony.” This was written in 1916, but evidently many things have changed since that time. Economic evolution, urbanization, spread of knowledge, technical progress have greatly modified individual and family life as well as social environment. And these transformations have affected the very core of both French-Canadian society and French-Canadian individuals. As a matter of fact, they have burst the old framework of self-sufficient social life and they have transformed the most fundamental motivations of the individual and of conjugal behaviour. Even in the observance of formal moral rules their impact has been felt. It is not surprising that such changes have affected the demographic pattern to a large extent. Most French-Canadian scholars, social philosophers, and political leaders, who are specially interested in the French-Canadian ethnic group, are relatively unaware of the extent of this demographic change and some would not readily admit it. In this paper, I would like to try to throw some light on the main demographic facts and problems of this evolution or, as one might be tempted to name it, revolution.

If we are to live we must act; action necessitates making choices; our choices, in turn, reflect philosophical outlooks and a multitude of competing pressures from the material world. In the politics of democracy choices are continually being made at many levels, under varying conditions, with the expectation that there is sufficient consensus within the community to produce or support decisions regarded by the members as comprehensible and tolerable.

In recent years political scientists have been directing their investigations to elections, probably the most conspicuous example of a formal choosing process in which most members of the community are entitled to participate. Resourceful manipulation of the cold figures in which these choices are recorded is now beginning to yield conclusions that can be expressed in qualitative as well as in the more customary quantitative terms. We are learning more and more about why voters make the political choices they do and we can confidently look to the “psephologists,” hovering over their wired boards, to give us more illuminating insights into this area of making decisions.

The construction of wooden vessels was an outstanding achievement of nineteenth-century Quebec. It spread along both shores, mainly on the north shore, from Sillery coves to the Isle of Orleans. It was the staple industry of Quebec city, for “half the men were engaged in shipbuilding and nearly all the rest in doing business with them.” At one time, twenty or more yards employed about five thousand workers, a good many of whom lived in what is now regarded as the parish, one and a half miles long and thirty feet wide. In the years of peak production, shipbuilding was closely associated with the lumber-export business. It supported a way of life characteristic of the nautical city which once hoped to become a great seaport in North America.

In the early fifties, indeed, Quebec-built ships commanded high prices in the British market; activity was brisk on the shores, tavern keepers did a good business, and some of them won the reputation of being effective crimps. Someone has said of this phase of prosperity that “the profiteers tried giving least and getting most,” and it was a byword that the “ordinary lumberjack and sailorman earnt like a horse and spent like an ass.” A feature of Quebec city and its vicinity at that time was the mingling of the French- and English-speaking people, as the proportion of the latter reached about 40 per cent of the total population. But this study need not elaborate ethnical folklore. Rather, it seeks to inquire briefly into the decline of the basic industry of Quebec city.

This article explores the structure of the Canadian economy revealed in the recently published inter-industry table for 1949. It seeks not to treat exhaustively any aspect of Canada's economic structure, but to use inter-industry methodology to test a variety of familiar hypotheses about that structure. In announcing the coming of input-output analysis to the Dominion Bureau of Statistics, S. A. Goldberg heralded the appearance of an “experimental table for the year 1949.” He stressed its prospective value for checking the consistency and completeness of the Bureau's statistical coverage. But he added the hope that the table would “help to strengthen the habit of looking at the economy as being composed of interrelated variables and in this manner … assist economic as well as statistical analysis. If the data provided by the table are useful for the purpose of appraising emerging trends in the economy, there will be an additional gain.” A demonstration of the uses and limits of “input-output analysis” may give some help to those who must estimate the marginal productivity of gathering further data in this area. Thus, a subsidiary theme of this article is the potential usefulness of inter-industry analysis for the formation of policy, both by government agencies and private firms.

Students of the national institutions of government in Canada are safe in taking a great deal for granted; the phrase in the British North America Act “a constitution similar in principle to that of the United Kingdom” is perhaps as important as all the rest of the act put together. It assumed a transfer of parliamentary institutions of the British type to Canada and, in fact, the transfer had taken place in eastern Canada well before 1867. The main change that has come about since is the adaptation of parliamentary government to the federal system. An assumption that provincial governments follow the parliamentary system and observe the conventions and usages associated with it may or may not be justified. In many cases provincial characteristics and habits of mind have moulded the institutions of government so as to make the features of the British ancestor barely discernible. Manitoba is a first-class example of this process of adaptation at work. The great forces that have operated are the fur trade, the premature creation of the province, and its primarily agrarian outlook. This paper is an attempt to describe and assess their influence on parliamentary government in the province.

In the perennial discussion of American influences in Canadian economic life, Canadian sensitivity to United States business fluctuations is a prominent topic. Through three-quarters of a century of “National Policy,” Canadian business cycle indicators have behaved like those of a “forty-ninth state,” and many Canadians feel concerned about the dependence of Canadian prosperity on conditions in the United States.

Canadian economists have discussed the channels through which external influences reach Canadian business, and the probable trends in the strength of these influences. There have, however, been only very rough comparisons of the timing and amplitude of fluctuations in the two countries. This paper1 reports on a study of fluctuations in Canadian and United States time series, designed to determine whether there have been any significant shifts over the last half-century in Canadian sensitivity to United States fluctuations. An introductory section summarizes some Canadian discussions on the influence of external fluctuations, since these discussions suggest hypotheses relevant to the statistical investigation.

This paper is an appraisal of the theory of crowds from the perspective of a study of how metropolitan police see and control them. Students of the behaviour of crowds have commented on the almost complete absence of empirical studies and of the consequent highly speculative nature of the major theories. To a great extent this state of affairs is a result of the difficulty of studying crowds, which are unpredictable in appearance, and formidable to study when identified. Furthermore, owing to the highly dramatic nature of the phenomenon, the usual secondary sources, both journalistic and historical, are quite unreliable.

A study of how the police see and control crowds obviates some of these difficulties. Individual policemen have recurrent experiences with most types of crowds. To control them they must make some appraisal of their origin, nature, and organization. The success or failure of the tactics they adopt functions as a test of their appraisal. The researcher, interviewing these policemen, is able to apply the test of consistency, and to check the most frequently recurrent statements against those of policemen with a great reputation for being able to control crowds. All the points presented in this paper have been validated in this way.

Transport costs have been somewhat neglected in international trade theory, most of which is expounded on the assumption that transport costs are absent. In this paper I shall present a simple geometric method for describing transport costs in offer-curve diagrams, and apply this method to consider the effects of transport costs on the terms of trade, the transfer problem, the optimum tariff, and real factor returns.

To avoid introducing a third industry—the transport industry—it will be necessary to employ a drastic, but very useful assumption regarding the nature of transport costs. I shall assume that transport costs are met by the wastage of a proportion of the goods traded. This assumption will mean that: if each country provides the resources for transporting its own exports, then only a proportion of the goods exported will be received as imports by the other country, the remainder being used up as costs of transport; if each country provides the resources for transporting its imports, then a proportion of its exports will be used up for every unit of the other country's good imported; and if each country shares in the transport of each good, some of each country's resources will be used up in transporting each good. The meaning of this assumption will become clearer later in the paper.

During the debates in the Australian federation conventions of 1891 and 1897–8, Canadian experience was usually cited to indicate practices to be avoided rather than emulated. J. W. Hackett, addressing the 1891 convention as a representative of Western Australia, which was then the least populous of the Australian colonies, stressed the need of a strong senate whose function it would be to convert the popular will into the federal will. From the viewpoint of a defender of the interest of the smaller colonies, the weakening of the prestige of the senate, through the cabinet's being responsible in practice to the lower house, made responsible government a threat which Hackett was ready to attack. He questioned whether responsible government could be successful under any conditions. The experiment of the Canadian Dominion was hardly a success. “It was begun … in bribery and is continued by subsidies.” Pointing to the agitation for home rule in Ireland, he suggested that responsible government was a failure in Britain itself. “If that is the responsible government which they wish to graft into our federation,” he asserted, “there will be one of two alternatives—either responsible government will kill federation, or federation, in the form in which we shall, I hope, be prepared to accept it, will kill responsible government.” Responsible government has, in fact, proved rather deadly to Hackett's idea of federalism. Nevertheless, in Australia, as in Canada, the cabinet itself has been federalized, although the process in Australia has not been recognized by the quantity of academic and popular commentary which has marked its Canadian counterpart.

It is one of the truisms of Canadian politics that stable federal power cannot be achieved without support from the province of Quebec. Until 1896 the dominant political party, the Conservatives, was the one which held Quebec. Since that period, Liberal ascendancy has been based on solid strength in French Canada. The problem of creating sufficient inter-cultural agreement to make possible the formulation of federal policy has been the most important single factor in determining the character of national party competition. This difficulty has set a premium on those skills of negotiation and conciliation which have in fact distinguished most successful Canadian statesmen, and has, more than anything else, inhibited the formation of national parties with consistent principles and policies.

Political parties, as a condition of national success, have had to unite French and English elements; but thus far they have done so only on the most tenuous basis. For many purposes, a minimal consensus was sufficient, but it seems to have been inadequate to achieve the full measure of power and influence which the Fathers of Confederation envisaged for central government. Although judicial decisions, and economic and geographic forces, may have accentuated the trend to a decentralization far greater than that contemplated in 1867, the basic reason for this development has been the impossibility of creating national parties which would unite both French and English Canadians behind alternative programmes. In the words of a French-Canadian historian: “Les principaux auteurs de la Confédération n'avaient pas caché leur intention d'organiser un gouvernement central très puissant.” It must be concluded that they either seriously overestimated the range of shared assumptions between the two cultures, or badly underestimated the degree of unity on fundamentals which was necessary to run the centralized state they had tried to create. The only type of national political party which Canada has been able to construct successfully has not proved capable of fulfilling their intentions.

The Canadian government's post-war policy of supporting the prices of government bonds and thereby restricting the workings of the free price system in regard to interest rates stood in decided contrast to its policy in most other fields, including since 1950 the field of exchange rates. As recently as 1954, the wisdom of this policy was reaffirmed by Mr. Graham Towers, then Governor of the Bank of Canada. In his view, freeing the interest rate at the end of the war would not have been a wise policy since the Canadian price level “could not have been held substantially below that which occurred in the United States without sacrificing an appreciable part of the increase in production which was achieved here.” This paper examines this apparent contradiction between the government's preference for price control in the field of interest rates and for the workings of the free price system elsewhere in the economy, and in the light of this analysis evaluates Canada's post-war monetary policy down to 1954.

The past two decades have witnessed a remarkable development in the science of national accounting. This development has taken or is taking place in three interrelated systems of accounts: first, the national product accounts; second, input-output accounts; and, third, money flows or flow of funds accounts. The national product accounts are concerned with transactions reflecting the economy's over-all productive accomplishment, that is, principally with incomes and expenditures measuring the value of final product. The input-output accounts focus on transactions between productive establishments and thereby supplement the national product accounts by providing an intensive analysis of technological interrelationships within the economy. The money flows or flow of funds accounts trace transactions in financial claims as well as goods and services and thereby contribute—what is lacking in the other two systems—an intensive analysis of financial interrelationships within the economy. The national transactions accounts in process of preparation in Ottawa are a version of this third type of accounts.

“Your business is not to govern the country; it is, if you think fit, to call to account those who do govern it.” This remark of Gladstone to the House of Commons during the Crimean War applies with equal validity to the Canadian House today. If Parliament is to call the Government to account, given party discipline as we know it, it must do so through the Opposition or it will not do so at all. Jennings comments: “The Opposition demands that policies be formulated openly, and the consequences of policies revealed. Parliament compels the Government to defend itself by open and rational argument; but it also compels the Opposition to state what is the alternative.”

This process of government by discussion involves more than the trading of facts and argument at arm's length between Government and Opposition. It enlists more than the intellects of the members; it involves their emotions as well. Members are conscious that they are the representatives of the people of the country, to whose desires and interests they must give voice. They are led in the course of debate to refer, usually in general terms, to the desirability of action along a certain line, or to express disapproval of another possible course. The Government, if it is wise, pays close attention to such remarks since the members' opinions are the most sensitive indicator of feelings in the constituencies. A rather vague agreement, usually transcending party, emerges on proposed lines of policy. It does not suggest a definite course of action at a given time; rather it indicates the trend and intensity of opinion in the country. In this vague and general sense, Parliament assists in the formulation of policy. As Lord Balfour said, “our whole political machinery presupposes a people so fundamentally at one, that they can afford safely to bicker.” It is up to Parliament to make clear on exactly what the nation is at one, as well as to take the lead in the bickering.

Wee hope to plant a nation, where none before hath stood.—Alexander Whitaker, Good Newes from Virginia, 1613.

Anthropological studies have shown that the myth of destiny, along with the myth of origin, has exerted a tremendous influence in shaping tribal mentality and sustaining tribal solidarity. In the history of many modern nations the influence of the myth of destiny can also be perceived. Thus, the belief in a peculiar destiny which had already been formulated among the separate colonies throughout the early period of American history was of special import in the growth of a consciousness of national identity among American colonists during the years of their struggle for independence.

This study aims at scrutinizing the changes in the formulation and meaning, during the revolutionary era, of the myth of a peculiar destiny and the impact of the doctrine of natural law in bringing about these changes. The main theses are, first, that the American colonists met the need felt during the revolutionary era for new evidence of and support for an American “destiny” by appealing to the seemingly secure tenets of the doctrine of natural law; and, second, that, as a consequence of this intermingling of “destiny” and “natural law,” the assertion of an American destiny was transformed from a “faith” to a “certainty,” or, more accurately, from a dream to an appointment “manifest.”