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?

Since the fourth quarter of 1950 the Canadian dollar has been allowed to find its price in terms of foreign currencies, usually with little official interference. During this period special interest groups have occasionally complained about the level of the rate of exchange, but, on the whole, the operation of the new system of exchange has met with satisfaction at home and admiration abroad. This success has depended on the small amplitude of the fluctuations that have taken place in the rate of exchange during short periods of time, say quarter to quarter. However, very little is known about the mechanism that has operated to maintain such stability as the rate has shown in practice. Confidence in the future stability of the rate can easily be mistaken under these circumstances. It is the purpose of this paper to shed some light on the equilibrating process in the market in foreign exchange by identifying the stabilizing influences in the balance of payment and by developing a possible explanation of their movement.

The items in the balance of international payments can be divided into two categories according to the manner in which they are related to the rate of exchange if it is assumed that they have demand and supply functions that are independent of each other and that they have ordinary Marshallian elasticities. The appropriate assumptions about other things to be held constant when analysing merchandise trade, for instance, include income and its distribution, relative prices, tastes, and production functions. The things held constant do not include other items in the international accounts such as movements of capital from which come the offsetting net supply or demand for foreign exchange. Some of the items are not independent: freight and shipping are obviously related to trade; but the smaller items are not taken up separately in this analysis.

The construction and use of occupational scales to serve as an index of social class have recently absorbed much of the time of sociologists in the United States. In Canada, on the other hand, very few studies of this nature have been published. This paper will outline the method used in the construction of such a scale, and the results obtained when it is applied to certain features of Canadian society.

The problems involved in the methodology of studies of stratification result partly from the lack of agreement among sociologists on a theoretical framework in this field, and partly from the lack of precise tools of measurement. The theoretical difficulties involved can be seen from an examination of four main lines of theoretical development in the works of Marx, Weber, Warner, Davis, and Parsons.

The individual's position in the system of production was seen by Marx as the fundamental determinant of class position. A subjective awareness of class is another vital element in his theory although such awareness follows from the objective position. The objective economic foundation of class is an important aspect of Max Weber's theory also, but unlike Marx, Weber gives equal importance to subjective awareness, and he shows the importance of power as well. The approach of W. L. Warner, which has been followed by so many sociologists, emphasizes the subjective awareness and claims that class is what people in the community say it is. It is the consensus of people about other people's position, and about the class divisions in the social structure.

Although the birth-rate has declined in all Western nations since the middle of the nineteenth century, the decline has not been equal among the various groups that compose their population. Measures of fertility for national units conceal differences in the fertility of the many distinct groups in urban-industrial societies. Changes in the pattern of these differences are of particular significance in the later stages of the demographic transition from high to low birth-rates and death-rates which the Western world has undergone in the past century. Changes in the birth-rate rather than in the death-rate are the main determinants of growth in societies where mortality has been brought under control by modern medicine and public health practices.

Demographers have often treated differential fertility as a special, virtually autonomous subject instead of viewing it in the broad historical context of the Western demographic transition. In fact, as J. W. Innes has pointed out, few studies have been made of trends in differential fertility by comparison with the numerous studies which simply establish the existence of group differences in fertility at a single point in time. The present paper is concerned with class differences—probably the most pervasive of all group differences in advanced societies. The attempt is made to gather together by historical period the available data on trends in class differences in fertility for several Western countries in order to present a systematic picture of the way in which these differences have evolved in modern times.

The problem of dividing a population into socio-economic classes that are genuinely distinct from one another in a sociologically meaningful sense has been widely discussed by sociologists. Demographers, however, usually work with official data which provide only limited information on the characteristics of populations. They are, therefore, unable to employ the more refined indices of class developed by sociologists and are forced to use as indices such relatively simple objective attributes as income, occupation, or education.

This article attempts to describe the process of election as it occurred in one Canadian constituency in the federal general election of June 10, 1957. Since it would be foolish to generalize on the basis of one example, no effort is made to draw conclusions. The article is expository and intended only to illumine one of the unexamined corners of Canadian political science after the fashion of Larzarsfeld’s work on the 1948 American election and the valuable constituency studies contained in Butler’s book on the British election of 1951.

Constituency X is a large residential electoral district, part of which lies within Metropolitan Toronto. Brought into being by the Redistribution Act of 1952, the riding grew quickly because of the flight to the suburbs and the rapid growth of Toronto. Between 1951 and 1956 the population more than doubled, from 72,117 to 167.310. The huge size of the constituency and its swift increase presented a challenge in organization that is worth noting in itself.

The task rested in the hands of a woman who had served as returning officer in the previous election also. For the 1957 election she began in October, 1956, to make preparations for taking the vote and by the following April she was giving all her working hours to the job. For the three months immediately preceding the election she had a full-time assistant and two part-time workers helping her. The extent of the operations involved can be gathered from the statistics. Enumerating the riding required the appointment of 636 enumerators and the assignment to them of 318 election kits containing about a dozen items each. In addition to supervising the drawing up, posting, and revision of the lists of electors, who totalled 104,000, the returning officer was also responsible for splitting the constituency into 318 polling divisions, for establishing 427 polling stations, and for appointing a deputy returning officer and an election clerk in each. On voting day, with a staff of four people, she tabulated the 74,995 votes cast and was among the first to report results.

Reliable predictions of future employment are but one of many pieces of intelligence useful to governments in the formulation and implementation of policies of economic stabilization. With the adoption of a stabilization programme in 1945 an explicit need for these predictions was created in the Canadian government. In that year the “Employment Forecast Survey” was initiated by the federal Department of Labour in an attempt to secure the data from which these predictions could be derived. This survey is still conducted by the Department.

This article summarizes the results of an analysis of the predictions which were derived from data obtained by the Employment Forecast Survey from 1946 until 1957, when this method was abandoned, and a new technique of securing predictions from the data was adopted. Because these predictions were so little known outside Canadian government circles it may be useful to provide a brief description of the technique by which they were made, and an assessment of their reliability.

The original conception of the survey was comparatively simple. It seemed reasonable, a priori, that the individual decision-makers in an industrial establishment would be able to forecast the future employment of their own establishment with considerable reliability.

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.

Because Canada has a labour force composed of more than one language stock, it is of interest to ask what social organization has developed to take account of this pluralism in her work world. Such an interest may take two main forms. First, with respect to a language variable, differences in occupational opportunities may be seen as the sole problem of Canadian Indians and Eskimos, of French Canadians, or of New Canadians. Second, we may wish to find out how our different language groups achieve interdependence in actual work situations and with what consequences for society as a whole. It is the second approach which will be adopted here; in a sense it includes the first, since the problem of any group stems in large part from the ways in which groups act on each other. The groups to which I shall limit my discussion will be the English and the French Canadians, but my remarks will undoubtedly apply, at least in part, to groups who speak other languages.

The view taken in this paper is that in our society, because English is the sole language which has currency in all aspects of social activity, people of different mother tongues have unequal opportunities for work. In a plural society, two consequences follow from the dominance of one language: a limited utilization of the potential skills of those who do not know the dominant language perfectly and a disengagement of the other mother tongues from important aspects of social reality.

Throughout its history the Canada Post Office has faced substantially the same set of problems but the emphasis has shifted. For instance, technology, which formerly was mainly related to the use of railways and then of automobiles and airplanes, is now concentrated on the problem of sorting mail by electronic means. At one time the Post Office devoted much attention to extending postal services to all parts of Canada, however remote. Now it is increasingly concerned with providing service intensively, that is, with giving door-to-door delivery in suburban areas and in every community of 5,000 or more people. Postal authorities and the general public have always been interested in the relative rates on letters, magazines, advertising circulars, and parcels, as well as in the allied question of a surplus or deficit on the operation of the Post Office as a whole. In the last few years rising wage-rates and rapid growth in the volume of second- and third-class mail have made the matter of pricing for postal services more significant than ever before. This article deals first with the history of the Canada Post Office and then with problems of the postal service which remain unsolved.

Before 1851, all postal services in British North America were ultimately controlled by the Postmaster General in London. Even after the reforms of Rowland Hill, the Postmaster General’s policy for the colonies was to secure a profit which was remitted to Britain. After the colonies assumed control they rapidly increased the number of offices and the milage of postal routes. Internal postage rates, which had averaged 18 cents per half ounce and were graduated for distance, became uniformly 2d. sterling or 5 cents anywhere in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Canada. The colonists bore the resultant deficits without much complaint.

In his work on group settlement in western Canada Professor C. A. Dawson has described five major ethnic-religious groups but he has not treated one very distinctive Canadian people, the Hutterites, who prefer to be known as the Hutterian Brethren. There is a sociological study of this group by the Canadian Mental Health Association and several monographs on various aspects of Hutterite life have been published in the United States, but on their settlement in western Canada there is only an unpublished M.A. thesis. My purpose here is to outline briefly the coming of the Hutterites to Canada, their economic and social habits, and the problems they present to western Canada.

The first Hutterites came to Canada in a delegation of three which arrived in Winnipeg in May, 1898, to explore the possibilities of moving the seven existing colonies from South Dakota to western Canada. The delegation was welcomed by the Commissioner of Immigration in Winnipeg and was supplied with free transportation to see southern Manitoba and Saskatchewan. On their return to South Dakota members of the delegation reported that though they had some doubts about the weather and the land they were “resolved to make a trial” at settling in Canada, if their requirements concerning schooling, military service, and freedom of religion were met by the federal government. Meanwhile a government agent was sent to the Hutterite colonies by the Department of the Interior to encourage the proposed move and to make a report on the Hutterities.

Despite the considerable influence exercised on North American historians by what Professor Careless has called “frontierism,” those who have dealt with the early history of the North Pacific have been almost unanimous in finding in metropolitan institutions the key to developments in that area. The usual interpretation is based on the hypothesis of a sharp competition for the North Pacific trade in furs between various forms of enterprise, each of which mirrored the institutions of the metropolis which had spawned it—a semi-government Russian corporation, government-directed Spanish enterprise (or lack of it), British enterprise almost hopelessly handicapped by obsolete trad¬ing institutions, and unrestricted (free) Yankee enterprise, with an occasional genuflection towards a similarly “free” enterprise based on Montreal but handicapped by the British connection. In that competition, it is alleged, the handicaps of government regulation precluded successful Russian, Spanish, or British competition with the “free enterprise” of the New Englander, and this, coupled with his superior resourcefulness and shrewdness—by-products, apparently, of the institutions of his particular metropolis—enabled him to dominate the North Pacific trade in furs.

While this interpretation may “validate the status” of one metropolis and at the same time “denigrate that of others”—the purpose, Leach suggests,2 of national myths and legends—it appears to be founded on caricatures of the forms of enterprise there, and on some lack of appreciation of the global setting in which the trade was carried on. Those caricatures, it would seem, derive from a focusing of attention on particular, and allegedly deplorable, elements of the metropolitanism of Spain or Russia or Britain, and from the assumption that, despite the remoteness of the frontier, those elements com¬pletely dominated the enterprise of the various competitors. The failure to achieve a proper perspective of the place of the North Pacific in the overseas thrust of European powers probably derives from a lack of appreciation of ends other than business profits and of the existence of alternative oppor¬tunities for such profits.

The market for books in Canada is of some interest in itself and as an example of the competition between British and United States goods in an important area. But perhaps no apology is required for addressing an article on such a subject to an academic audience, many of whom have an active and substantial personal interest in the matter.

The market for books in Canada is in reality several different markets, sometimes sharply differentiated on the side of the consumer, and often on that of the producer as well. There is, first of all, the division between French- and English-language books, bookstores, and publishers. Then there is the large and valuable market in school books, which is, in the main, dominated by provincial authorities and by a group of publishers catering to the very special and often parochial tastes of these bodies. The university market, though not so clearly differentiated, is coloured to some extent by the necessity of winning “adoptions” of a given text by the instructor, and by the importance of the university bookstore. There is again the substantial market organized by the United States book clubs. Even more important is the competing market in reprints and paperbacks. That sub-section of the English-language market on which most interest centres in this paper is that for so-called trade books, that is, books which are sold to the general reading public.

Halford John Mackinder, who has enjoyed considerable recognition as a founder of modern geographical study, achieved a widespread renown over a decade ago as the pioneer of the “science of geopolitics” of which Hitler had become a disciple. His other accomplishments, however, have been rather neglected, especially his work as an economic theorist and politician. At the beginning of the century, Mackinder was a principal spokesman for the Liberal-Imperialists; he was, in fact, well on his way toward a cabinet post. As a free trade Imperialist, he described with unusual insight the imperialism of capital export, anticipating at some points the later analysis of Hobson and the neo-Marxists, Hilferding and Luxemburg. Then, after a remarkable and sudden conversion to the Chamberlain programme of protection, he demonstrated a similar grasp of the rival neo-mercantile imperialism, and became one of its leading public advocates.

Mackinder was born at Gainsborough in 1861. His father was a doctor and, his first interests being in the field of science, he accepted, in 1880, a junior studentship in physical science at Christ Church, Oxford, where he intended to specialize in biology. While at Oxford, Mackinder discovered how broad and varied were his interests and his talents. He read for two honours schools, natural science and modern history, and for the bar–he was called at the Inner Temple in 1886. More and more, however, he devoted himself to geography, a subject to whose acceptance as an academic discipline he was to make so signal a contribution.