This, one of the extremely limited number of full-length studies devoted exclusively to resale price maintenance in Great Britain, is a doctoral thesis submitted to the University of Amsterdam. The author, apparently trained in economics at British universities, also claims a “connection with the trade in branded consumer goods” lasting “for a number of years.” In his introduction, Dr. Kuipers expresses particular dissatisfaction with the theoretical analyses advanced by British economists, which, he claims, are inadequately supported by “facts.” His own analysis he believes to be sufficiently comprehensive to enable him to derive a formula, “the adoption of which … would provide an adequate solution to the problem [of resale price maintenance] in Great Britain under present conditions” (p. 3). The degree to which other economists will recognize this ambitious claim will depend on whether they accept Kuipers' analysis of what “the problem” of resale price maintenance is and, for those who do, whether they also believe that his particular scheme is desirable and administratively feasible.

The volume is divided into two parts: the first deals in a general way with the legal and economic aspects of resale price maintenance in Great Britain and lays the basis for Dr. Kuipers' policy recommendations; the second part deals with the nature and extent of price maintenance in the British grocery trade. Although more than one hundred pages are devoted to the latter section, the empirical data upon which the statistical analysis is based are very sketchy. Dr. Kuipers is not unaware of this weakness but he considers the results “generally accurate” and “sufficiently near the mark.” Whether or not one agrees with this assessment, there can be little question that Dr. Kuipers has achieved as much as an individual investigator, working unassisted, could hope to do.

The decennial redistribution of federal constituencies in Canada always reveals the House of Commons in an unusual light. Almost alone among major pieces of legislation, the Representation Bill that follows each census is not openly an embodiment of cabinet policy; for statements of policy are confined to declarations that redistribution is the business of the House, not of the government. Party discipline is thus relaxed to the extent that every member of Parliament must look out for himself, and in this self-seeking he can assume that his party colleagues, particularly those from his own province, will stand by him; and they do. A redistribution calls forth not party discipline but party cohesion, and commonly offers many illustrations of the decentralized nature of Canadian political organization. Since every member of Parliament is an expert on at least one clause in the bill and has a vested interest in one constituency, local and personal considerations enter largely into debate, so that the House of Commons during a redistribution presents a somewhat disconcerting picture of what the electorate could expect if cabinet leadership in important legislation were weak or relaxed all the time instead of once in ten years.

Modern macro-economic analysis has emphasized the role of saving and investment in economic fluctuations. As the totals of saving and investment are important, so are their components; for the more that is known about the components the more meaningful are the aggregates. Life insurance savings merit investigation for at least two reasons. In the first place, they constitute an important medium through which personal savings are effected. In Canada from 1926 to 1948, except for the war years, 39.0 per cent of total net personal savings were realized through the purchase of life insurance.

This voluminous flow of savings has produced an accumulation of investment assets which has attracted the attention of economists concerned with trends in the supply of equity capital and the stimulation of depression period investment. Since the rate of return expected on insurance investments is important in determining premiums, the investment practices of the insurance companies have a bearing upon the welfare of millions of Canadians. This concern of the economists about insurance investments is the basis of a second reason for examining insurance savings. In the various proposals involving insurance investment it appears that the savings side of the question has been too little emphasized. In the case of an investment intermediary, investment policy cannot be considered totally apart from the demand for the institution's product; the institution's demand for investment outlets is a derived demand.

British post-war experience constitutes the best case yet available for study of a conscious government policy of combining full employment and price stability within the framework of free collective bargaining. In this paper, a few of the unresolved problems inherent in a full-employment economy are examined in the light of British experience. The hard core of the problem of full-employment price instability is the difficulty of restraining demands for higher wages, not because labour is less “responsible” than other sectors of the economy, but because wages constitute the largest single item both of costs and of income. It is therefore interesting to determine whether British governments have produced a wage policy which could compress wage demands within the limits say, of the productivity of labour. Has any principle (other than uninhibited self-interest) provided a new orientation to the process of collective bargaining? Has collective bargaining with a fully employed labour force in Britain disturbed the traditional constancy of distributive shares to capital and labour and if so, what was the impact of this, in turn, on economic reconstruction? What, in general, has been the rationale of trade unions in the environment of full employment? Britain has attempted to discover answers to these problems. Only by knowing these answers can we intelligently appraise the policy of maintaining full employment.

The purpose of this paper is to sketch briefly some aspects of Bourassa's political and social thought and to indicate in particular a few of the influences shaping his complex mentality. With the historical detail of his public career, and of the Nationalist movement which he led in the first two decades of this century, the paper is not directly concerned. Nor is any attempt made to reach a final estimate of his influence or significance in Canadian politics.

The difficulties in examining Bourassa's ideas are many and arise not only from his radical temperament and tendency to over-statement. They spring also from his great sensitivity to the intellectual and emotional currents of his day which found expression in innumerable pamphlets, speeches, and editorials in his newspaper of ideas and combat, Le Devoir, founded in 1910. Difficulties are implicit in the complicated nature of the task he sought to perform. For he set out, at the turn of the century, and with a sense of the opening of a new era in the historic development of the French-Canadian people, to re-examine every aspect of his people's situation; political, social, economic, moral, religious, and intellectual. He proposed to expound principles basic to their social thought and action in a new set of circumstances.

Three main elements in the new era were of special concern. First was the impact upon Canada of the new imperialism, opening up prospects of direct involvement in imperial wars in an age of mounting imperial rivalries, and threatening, moreover, so he believed, to undermine toleration of cultural and ethnic difference in Canada. A second major change in circumstance was the rapid development after 1900 of the Canadian West on the basis of a large immigrant population of diverse peoples, posing grave difficulties to the achievement of the ideal of a dual nationality throughout Canada. Finally, he became much concerned with the deeper significance to French-Canadian nationality of the whole complex of adaptations—ideological, moral, economic, and social—being made in response to the coming of North American urban industrialism to the province of Quebec.

Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton belongs to the group of Benthamite disciples who, in the generation after the publication of Mill's Essay on Government, initiated that programme of legislative and administrative reform which transformed the England of Eldonian Toryism into that of Gladstonian Liberalism. In half a dozen fields of first-class importance—education, law, factory legislation, colonial administration, the reform of the civil service—they applied the Benthamite principles with energy and enthusiasm. The two Mills in the India Office, Southwood Smith in the Poor Law Commission, Cornewall Lewis, whose book on political semantics has been too long neglected, at the War Office, Sir Henry Taylor at the Colonial Office, all combined the Radical application of disinterested intelligence to the art of government with a genius for administration which outraged both aristocratic sinecurist and Cobdenite business man. With a passion for statistics worthy of Dickens' Gradgrind, factory inspectors like Leonard Horner and medical officers like John Simon gathered the material which Marx later employed in his brilliant indictment of industrial capitalism. They married theory to practice; Austin elaborated from his naval experience a theory of sovereignty in which the ability to command became the essence of government, while the younger Mill discovered in the running of the East India Company principles of efficient public administration which the ancient universities were quite incapable of supplying. They obtained a new prestige for the public servant; the growth of the English civil service in the nineteenth century, indeed, is nothing much more than the gradual fulfilment in practice of the major ideas outlined in Bentham's fertile Constitutional Code.

The cold war has resulted in levels of government spending in advanced countries far bigger than the post-war deflationary gaps as estimated by the most pessimistic of the pessimists. Deflationary gaps have been over-filled, and the postwar situation in the advanced countries has been one of chronic inflation rather than chronic under-employment. The high level of demand in the advanced countries has also aggravated the chronic inflationary pressure in the less developed countries. It is natural, therefore, that the attention of economists and laymen alike should have turned from public spending policy to tax policy.

The general tax problem which seems to have aroused most interest is, “What are the limits to taxable capacity?” Among business men, trade union officials, government advisers, and even among professional economists, from Canada to Indonesia, one often hears today the statement that when tax rates reach a certain limit, further increases in tax rates will be inflationary rather than deflationary. It is the present writer's opinion that this statement is based upon a misunderstanding, and that its frequent repetition in high places calls for a restatement of home truths regarding the economic effects of taxation. What follows is certainly not original analysis; but sometimes a simple application of familiar but appropriate tools can help to clarify an economic policy issue. Such clarification is the purpose of this note.