On May 1, 1851, Queen Victoria, accompanied by the Prince Consort, to whom must be given credit for the undertaking, with the royal family, the ministers of state, ambassadors, and a great throng of all who were famous in the United Kingdom, opened the Great Exhibition housed in the Crystal Palace, “that blazing arch of lucid glass.” A massed choir of a thousand voices—the Victorians loved massed choirs and massed orchestras—sang an ode composed by Tennyson, the Poet Laureate, in which they praised “the invisible, universal Lord,”

Who lets once more in peace the nations meet,
Where Science, Art and Labour have outpour'd
Their myriad horns of plenty at our feet.

The exhibition was off to a good start, and its success was phenomenal. Fourteen thousand exhibitors from all the leading nations of the world had brought the best they had of their wares. Six million visitors, brought to England by the new steamships and to London by the new railways, came to see the marvels displayed, and thought it all very wonderful. And it was wonderful; nothing like it had ever been seen before. It was the apotheosis of the Industrial Revolution. The Victorians believed in Progress; they had every reason to believe in it and the Crystal Palace was its outward and visible sign. The entrepreneurs, the manufacturers were entirely satisfied with things. Everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. God was in his heaven and all was right everywhere; or at least it was all right in Manchester where they made fortunes from cottons; and in the Black Country where, under the shadow of those “dark satanic mills” which had vexed the gentle soul of William Blake, they were making even greater fortunes.

Libertarian writers such as Hayek, Friedman, Hospers and Nozick have insisted that welfare state policies are, per se, inimical to the classical liberal notion of freedom. The purpose of this article is to test the internal coherence of the libertarian attack upon the welfare state. Special attention is given to Friedman's contentions in his Capitalism and Freedom. It is argued that the libertarian attack upon the welfare state is misguided. Indeed, it is suggested that in order to achieve the type of individual liberty that libertarians wish to secure the state must be assigned a positive welfare role.

At the outbreak of war in August, 1914, plans to cope with a possible food scarcity in the Allied countries were of a rudimentary character. For example, in the War Book of the British Government, there was only one measure dealing directly with food, and that a measure for obtaining information. In France the only legislation on agriculture or foodstuffs existing at the outbreak of war was a law of the period of the Revolution, dating back to July, 1791, which authorized the fixing of retail prices for bread and meat. Hence, methods of procedure had to be improvised as difficulties arose and it was not until well on towards the close of hostilities that anything like a comprehensive food policy had been devised.

As the central foodstuff in the diet of the peoples of the western Allied powers, bread came to play a leading role in the development of food policy. In the words of the body that was later to dominate world import trade in wheat, bread was “the only diet which sufficed in isolation and was therefore, indispensable.” Other foods might fail or be in short supply, but starvation seemed a long way off so long as there was enough bread. In the United Kingdom an implicit “breadstuffs policy” underlay the whole structure of food policy. Though never expressed in any one document, that policy has been stated in these words: whatever else was allowed to be in short supply, whether for human or for animal consumption, there should be a sufficiency of breadstuffs to meet in full all demands for them without rationing. In the other European Allied countries the direction of policy is not so clear but, with surprising unanimity, efforts were directed to keeping bread cheap and plentiful.

Economic literature of the past decade suggests, and most economists would surely agree, that there are two fundamental economic problems: unemployment and monopoly. Together, enforced idleness of resources and maldistribution of resources due to monopolization of all kinds are responsible for whatever gap exists between actual and potential national real income. They account for a good deal of the inequity of income distribution as well. Economic policy has as its chief concern the elimination of monopoly without loss of efficiency, and the elimination of unemployment without inflation or misuse of resources.

The post-war period will present these two basic problems in aggravated form. Exigencies of war have led to increased concentration of industry, which could easily crystallize into enhanced monopoly power. With half our national income now generated by war expenditures, the task of maintaining full employment while shifting production from things that win wars to things that promote welfare will be of unprecedented magnitude. At the same time, vast new holdings of cash and other liquid resources, combined with the backlog of demand for both consumers' and producers' goods that will have accumulated, will constitute a grave threat of inflation. The balance of the economy, which must be maintained by what Professor Lerner has aptly called “functional finance,” will be delicate indeed.

This article suggests an approach to post-war tax policy designed to meet these problems. While the setting is Canadian, the analytical tools and even the policies proposed would be applicable to the British or American scenes with minor modifications.

This article tests hypotheses about the electoral support of Canada's first—and perhaps most significant—third party. It demonstrates that two micro-economic concepts, price elasticity of demand and efficiency of production, describe accurately the material base of Progressive party support. It thereby subsumes the study of agrarian parties and voting behaviour within a more general (public choice) framework. It also clarifies and substantiates important elements of the conventional wisdom about Progressive support, and it suggests means which might also shed new light upon the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and Social Credit.

All administrative structures are affected by their cultural, social, economic, and political environments. The daily interactions between the two sectors comprise the substance of the administrative activity. In 1973 Zaïre's local administration was subjected to a reform which centralized and standardized its structures. This article examines the reform of the administration from the perspective of social underdevelopment. The local administrative cadres appeared to emerge from the reform with more power and prestige in social planning. However, the actual outcome of the reform in terms of development was doubtful since the authorities who acquired politico-administrative functions were engaged in their own lucrative activities and the public had little control over their administrative actions. Thus the administrative structure became an instrument which the dominant class—the bourgeois politico-administration—could use to strengthen its power over the economy. It could scarcely be otherwise in a situation in which underdevelopment creates and sustains a continual crisis. The consequences are inequalityx in the distribution of public goods and inequity in public decisions. All of these factors produce real stagnation in the society, in spite of the apparently revolutionary upsets which have occurred from time to time. They permit external domination to strengthen its hand and allow internal domination to carve out a suitable empire. To change the situation and free up local administration would require a genuine revolution in the devolution of power to the whole public.

This article analyzes the impact of freer trade on Canadian foreign investment policy. Its object is to identify new measures of control that were applied to the activities of foreign companies between 1975 and 1983. The evolution of relations between governments and multinationals is traced and followed by an analysis of the various measures that were implemented to control foreign investment by these governments. Finally, the study of the Canadian situation focusses on the four following measures: direct aid, procurement policies, the Foreign Investment Review Agency and world product mandates. These measures have a specific sectorial impact and attempt to increase Canadian benefits from foreign multinationals.

Division of power and social integration

Explanation of some of the recent challenges to western democracy may be found in a re-examination of Montesquieu's thought. Here we find the theory of the separation of power to be far more complex than is implied in the simple divisions of legislature, executive, and judiciary. For Montesquieu, the separation of power is more a social division than a political or juridical one. He contemplated returning the organs of political power to various social forces, e.g. monarchy, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie, and that then the self-assertion of forces would be restrained by the resistance of other social groups. The realization of its goals would require every important social group to integrate itself both to society and to the state and to seek its goals through realization of the general good.

Since Montesquieu's time, political structures would seem to have been very little changed even though social structures have been greatly altered by the rise of economic powers. Political institutions have been losing touch with the vital forces of society and these have had to find other channels of expression. The personalization of power, the rise of the executive, violence, and increasing paternalism may be viewed as phenomena of compensation by which attempts are being made to bridge the gap between the structures of political power and those of a society which has been restructured.

Revigoration of parliamentary democracy would seem to require that all vital social forces be reintegrated into the political system and be given meaningful channels of political expression. Failure to make such changes opens the way to identification of the political powers with technocracy and the increasing general use of violence in the resolution of social problems.