Robert Nozick seeks to extract a substantive theory of distributive justice (“the entitlement theory”) from what he takes to be the formal properties of natural rights (or rights-based) theory. The unsoundness of his arguments supports the longstanding suspicion that all such theories are conceptually confused and ideological biased. Yet upon examination, the classical (chiefly Lockean) views that Nozick regards as a prototype of natural rights theory withstand that suspicion precisely in so far as they lack the formal properties of his own theory. I conclude that theories of the classical form are better equipped to resolve political arguments.

The constitutional crisis of 1889 in Newfoundland offers an excellent example of what may occur when a governor, in the full belief that he is adhering to the strict observance of his constitutional position, yet manages to defy its limits, bring it into disrepute, and earn the opprobrium of nearly all concerned. That the Governor of Newfoundland did so, as the unsuspecting instrument of a political struggle, points up the dangers of appointing to high office men with little or no appreciation of the duties and responsibilities they are called upon to assume. The crisis of 1889 proves above all the importance that must be attached to the choice of men of good intelligence, even temper, and flexibility. When to insist on the exercise of his prerogatives and when to desist are questions that a governor can only solve by considering as far as possible the results of the choice he makes. A very difficult decision, admittedly, but one which will primarily depend on the governor's tact, influence, articulation, the vital features of his official personality. There is no need to stress the importance of the problem discussed below; the list of constitutional authorities who have studied similar questions is an impressive and well-known one.

The Governor in question was Sir Terence O'Brien, a military man who had qualified as an engineer and surveyor in India, had for some years been Inspector General of Police in Mauritius, and, immediately before coming to Newfoundland in 1889, had served as Governor of Heligoland. His immediate concern in Newfoundland was, as befits a man with military experience, the fortification of St. John's against attack in the event of a global conflict which he saw as imminent; but this project was fated to suffer the indifference of a government that did not share his views. In November, 1889, the Governor's attention was abruptly diverted from his scheme of defence to a situation that appeared quite normal and might have remained so but for a combination of events that he grasped only imperfectly.

Our civilization is properly called an urban civilization, for the forces which shape it gather in the cities and spread out from them. The cities integrate, and in many ways dominate, the entire society. An inquiry into the nature of the city, then, is also an inquiry into much that is important to the nature of civilization itself. The defects of cities are defects of the whole system of living.

There are different types of large cities, but the type which is most significant in this inquiry is the industrial-commercial metropolis. Resort cities, capital cities, shrine cities, and the like may be conspicuous, but they do not have the same kind of influence. It is the metropolis which expresses the essence of our system. All references to cities in this paper are to this type.

The most thorough studies of cities have been made in the United States, but in so far as other observations have been made they indicate that with caution the results may be extended to other large cities of the world. It has been shown that the large expanding city has a natural form which is repeated in all cities, and which is not only unplanned, but for the most part not responsive to efforts at control. There is a basic pattern which no city escapes; a spatial order of population groups and institutions and of functional parts of the economy, and a number of states of social organization and disorganization which are related to this order. This paper is principally concerned with the typical forms of disorganization, and the conditions under which they arise and some of the results of efforts to deal with them.

There is an almost universal expectation of considerable social reconstruction in Great Britain as soon as the United Nations have achieved victory, and even of instalments in the course of the war itself. This expectation rests upon keen disapproval of certain British social and economie institutions, but also upon confidence in and respect for a national character, which, in the centuries of its development, has achieved mighty and noble works in the building of its political and economic habitation.

In the following observations on the subject of reconstruction we shall be chiefly concerned with four factors: the influences that have produced the manifestly strong impetus to reconstruct; the cardinal reforms that are in mind; the agencies which have been established to collate, ponder, and implement the proposals; and finally, it will be well to find an answer to the question, what are the prospects of substantial advance?

Britain entered the war in a deliberate, not a romantic frame of mind. There was a job to be done, a terrible problem to be solved, not an adventure to be enjoyed. This sobriety led to the immediate raising of the question, “How can this shocking event be prevented from recurring, and to what extent are we as a nation responsible for it?” The result was a widespread canvassing of war aims and peace aims—the newspapers were at once full of the discussion. Generally, the first phase of attention was to international arrangements, and, in the course of time, this produced a spate of suggestions revolving around the conception of federalism. We need not do more than point to the establishment of Federal Union, and the series of papers written on the subject of World Order under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs.

Economists have long been aware of the interdependence of the consumption and the consumption plans of individuals. For the most part they have been interested in the implications of this interdependence for the theory of market behaviour rather than in its implications for welfare. The purpose of this article is to give a detailed diagrammatic treatment of the welfare implications of external economies and diseconomies of consumption. In particular, we shall discuss the fiscal measures which, in a competitive economy, would provide the incentives necessary to the attainment of an optimal allocation of resources.

We shall distinguish from each other, and consider separately, three types of interdependence of consumption and consumption plans.

(i) The consumption of a particular commodity X by a particular individual A may increase (decrease) the satisfactions of other individuals, that is, generate external economies (diseconomies).

(ii) The consumption of a particular commodity X may change the satisfactions of other individuals independently of the identity of the consumer.

(iii) The receipt of money income by a particular individual A may, independently of his manner of disposal of the income, change the satisfactions of other individuals.

No doubt this classification is not exhaustive. Thus no place is found for various external repercussions of consumption which might be discussed in a dynamic model, that is, in a model permitting instability of preference maps. Even in static models a place could be found for types of interdependence not discussed here. Many of these excluded types, however, can be described as combinations of those already enumerated (for example, a particular act of consumption may lower the satisfaction of some, raise that of other individuals) and can be treated by the techniques to be developed for their analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the implications for Canadians of the recent report of the Franks Committee on administrative justice in England. This is the second English report of its kind to be made in twenty-five years, the first being the famous Report of the Committee on Ministers' Powers in 1932. Both committees made exhaustive inquiries into the actual day-to-day working of English administrative justice and in the light of that knowledge made recommendations for its improvement. In the United States, the Report of the Attorney General's Committee on Administrative Procedure reviewed in 1941 the federal administrative process as it actually operated; in the light of that report, Congress passed in 1946 the Administrative Procedure Act laying down in fairly general terms the minimum standards of procedure to be observed in the administrative exercise of delegated powers of adjudication; and in 1955 a Task Force on Legal Services and Procedure made a year-long study of the entire field of federal administrative law and submitted its conclusions in a 442-page report to the Hoover Commission. In Canada there has never been any offiicial inquiry into such questions.

For this reason—and we should do well to admit it before we begin trying to learn lessons from the Franks Report—we Canadians do not know much about our own situation. We do know that in our country, as in England and in the United States, there is at the federal level and at the provincial level a heterogeneous collection of bodies other than courts—independent commissions, civil service departments, and other statutory authorities—deciding disputes between that mighty engine, the state, and the individual citizen or business corporation; but of what most of them in fact do, how they do it, and to what extent they are supervised, checked, or controlled, we have only hazy and rather general knowledge.

Probably no idea has been more widely propagated during the last few years than that a way out of the depression in Canada could be easily won by a thoroughgoing dose of inflation. In parts of western Canada the pursuit of cheap money has become not merely a cult but, with many of the characteristics of mass hysteria, has all the intolerance of an evangelical movement; anyone who ventures to disagree with the devotees of social credit is regarded by them as being either stone blind to the master evil in our present economic situation or woefully recreant to the obligations of human society. There are, however, many people in Canada, not associated with the social credit groups, who believe that the way to recovery lies along the road of inflation. The precise form that inflation should take differs from person to person but the general idea is in the air and is worthy of examination and, if possible, of some clarification.

La science politique n'a pas encore réussi à élaborer de grands ensembles théoriques. A vrai dire, les politicologues doivent se contenter de quelques généralisations, assimilables tout au plus à des hypothèses de travail d'une nature bien particulière, de typologies destinées à faciliter le dépouillement des données politiques. Signalons à la volée, les multiples typologies des régimes politiques, les essais de classification de « l'homme politique » et les théories des « élites ». Toutefois, devant la nécessité de développer et de multiplier démarches et recherches en vue d'échaffauder un début de théorie, il nous paraît intéressant, utile peut-être, de tenter de découvrir la dynamique qui agite et soutient les divers éléments d'une telle typologie.

Ainsi, la typologie des partis politiques, mise au point par Maurice Duverger. Le juriste français a regroupé autour de deux principaux pôles les divers types de partis politiques que connaît le monde contemporain. Les « partis de notables », groupes restreints composés de personnalités en vue dans un milieu et dont l'objectif unique se définit par l'organisation des campagnes électorales, se dressent contre les « partis de masse », créés par les mouvements socialistes européens et destinés à rallier tous les sympathisants d'une même cause politique, de façon permanente. Bien sûr, Duverger reconnaît la possibilité de multiples variantes, sur un continuum reliant ces deux pôles extrêmes.

This paper is concerned with rural local government, and particularly with the equalization feature of grants to local governments. Reference is made to the Alberta situation.

Significant Differences between Urban and Rural Municipalities. The position of the rural municipality is significantly different from that of its urban counterpart. The basic difference is in fiscal capacity. Fiscal capacity is financial ability, within the taxing powers provided, to perform the functions for which the municipality is responsible.

All taxes are ultimately paid out of income. Rural per capita income is relatively low; disparities in income are less pronounced; production and income are more variable and uncertain; and income produced in rural areas is largely spent within urban jurisdictions. Consequently taxable capacity is lower; and certain forms of taxes (for example, income taxes, sales taxes, and amusement taxes), efficient and appropriate under urban conditions, would be unproductive and uncertain sources of revenue under rural circumstances. The fiscal capacity of rural units is further affected by population dispersion so that the costs of some services, frequently sources of net revenue to urban governments, are high or prohibitive in rural areas.

The history of Quebec as a province since Confederation has not received the attention it merits. This is the more surprising when one considers the study which has been devoted to the history of Lower Canada, to the old province of Quebec, and to New France. Political disputes at once violent and petty are supposed to constitute the history of Quebec since Confederation. It is unfortunate that this view is so widely held, because along with factional struggles went important and interesting economic, social, and political experiments all more or less closely connected with French-Canadian nationalist aspirations. While many of these experiments were local in origin, their growth had an influence far beyond the boundaries of the province. In this paper I propose to consider only one of these developments: some early French-Canadian views on protection.

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.