The historic controversy over the “rights of the subject” has again come into public prominence and gives evidence of being here to stay for a considerable period. The occasion of the new interest in the topic was apparently the notable departure from customary procedures in the espionage cases, but once attention was directed to the issue additional grounds for grave anxiety were found in the treatment of Jehovah's Witnesses in the province of Quebec. It would be a mistake, however, to consider that these particular examples of the invasion of civil liberties reveal a novel form of arbitrary conduct in Canadian government. The essential conditions of the situation have been present in most parts of the country for many years, though generally unobserved and unchallenged. Indeed, the current alarm might easily have been dissipated and the recent events might have been a warning only to the most sensitive if those responsible had expressed the least nominal regret at their mistakes.

The mishandled problem of reparations and inter-Allied war debts looms large in customary analyses of the wreckage of the European peace settlement after World War I. The seminal source of trouble then was the insatiable appetite of the Versailles victors for “spoils,” joined by the Shylock American insistence on repayment of war debts.

After World War II the war debt problem was gently erased, but reparations proved even more troublesome. Although those powers which a generation before had moulded the Versailles Treaty were, under American leadership, comparatively tame in their reparations demands, the Soviets were not. This is readily understandable, since the German armies spent their destructive fury on Eastern and not on Western lands. The Soviet loss of life and resources in repelling German armies from the heart of Russia was truly colossal. The war wiped out hard-won advances (factories, inventories, power plants, residences, tractors) achieved since 1917 under lash and by dint of incredible austerity.1 The Soviet economy was planned and, with its insistent commodity needs, could absorb immense quantities of manufactured goods. Despite bomb-smashed German city centres and residences, German manpower remained, as well as powerful industrial facilities which operated up to the closing months of the war. Any trained observer would expect the Soviets to demand maximum one-time drainage and continuing arrangements whereby some German industrial facilities would be worked by some German labour to produce goods and services for Eastern benefit. This was precisely the policy later carried out within the Soviet Zone of Germany which, if it was not “milked dry,” was converted into a massive pumping station for current product reparations.2 A less self-regarding Soviet policy toward the leading “ex-enemy” country would have been astonishing in view of the substantive drainage from “liberated” satellite areas.

Modern war has frequently been described as “total” war. While such a description may not be precisely meaningful, it serves to emphasize the magnitude of the social changes which are now inevitably associated with a major war effort. Modern war has been well described as an industrial art, whose effective prosecution necessitates fundamental alterations in the manner of operation of the democratic peace-time economy.

The basic problems which confront a country in time of war may be classified as follows: (1) producing the goods and services necessary for carrying on the war; (2) paying for the goods and services used for war purposes; (3) supplying the everyday needs of the civilian population. While it is with the second problem, that of financing the war effort, that we shall be directly concerned in this paper, the fundamental and most immediate problem is that of production, to which all others must always be subordinated. Because of the enormous technological advances in the methods of modern warfare, World War II presented all of these problems on a scale vastly greater than ever before.

In time of war there occurs a revaluation of social ends, and maintenance of the state itself becomes the supreme social objective. To accomplish this objective under conditions of modern warfare, it is essential that, the organization and expansion of war production be accomplished with the utmost, possible speed. This point was well illustrated by the experience in World War II, where the problem of mobilizing the required quantities of productive resources was extremely complex, and where various nations with superior economic war potentials found themselves in imminent danger of suffering defeat before their full economic strength could be directed effectively against the enemy. Under these circumstances, where speed is the essence of effective economic mobilization, the sudden demand for an ever-increasing quantity and variety of war goods and services is likely to be highly inelastic, since the needs must be satisfied, if at all possible, regardless of price. But in the short run, supply is also relatively inelastic, and the government consequently finds itself confronted with immediate problems of procurement.

The year 1948 goes down in the history of Canadian politics as the year of national party conventions. Meeting at Ottawa, both the Liberals and the Conservatives used national party conventions to select new national leaders, to revitalize their national party organizations, and to revamp their party platforms. The C.C.F., meeting in Winnipeg, although not in the throes of change of party leadership, likewise used a national convention as a vehicle for discussion of organization and platform problems. That the questions of leadership, organization, and platform are properly subjects for deliberation by representative assemblies of party stalwarts is today unquestioned in Canada.

Yet, so far as the Liberal and Conservative parties are concerned, acceptance of the convention procedure for consideration of important party matters is based upon limited experience. While national party conclaves have not been uncommon, national party “conventions” especially designed to include delegates selected by and representing the individual federal ridings have been infrequent. Actually, the first truly representative national convention after confederation was that of the Liberal party in 1893.1 In 1919, Mackenzie King was selected as leader of the party at another great convention2 and it was not until 1948 that the Liberals met again. As a party in opposition, whose path back into office has been far from smooth, the Conservatives have in recent years had more occasion to use national party conventions. They assembled in 1927, 1938, 1942,3 and again in 1948.

The national party convention appears to have challenged the role of the party’s elected members of parliament as the dominating ruler of the party in selecting the party leader and formulating the party platform and organization. Of course the parliamentary party group plays a prominent part in convention proceedings, but the significant thing is that the parliamentary group now must, in some instances, exercise its influence through the medium of a representative convention in which the members of parliament can be outvoted by the local delegates.

Until recently, except in the relatively limited field of industrial production, no measure, in volume terms, of the over-all output of the Canadian economy was available. The estimates of Gross National Product had been published only in current dollars. The release, since 1950, of Gross National Expenditure in constant dollars, and especially the historical series from 1926 to 1950 published early last year, provided economists, statisticians, and the business community in general with an analytical tool of unusual relevance and value.

In recent years, because of violent changes in prices, unadjusted value series, used in isolation, have become increasingly inadequate as indicators of economic trends. Of necessity, interest has shifted to measures of volume. For some purposes, as in studies of productivity and real growth of the economy, constant dollar series provide at least an over-all framework and some generalized magnitudes. I will attempt to describe in this paper the work now being done at the Dominion Bureau of Statistics in the field of real output. The discussion of scope, principles, methods, and problems of the projects involved is preceded by a short summary of the history and background of the work.

Lottery tickets have been bought and sold in many countries for several centuries. There are many discussions of the historical social customs attending lotteries; the psychological, gambling, and fraudulent aspects of lotteries; the moral issues involved in the state licensing of lotteries; the lottery as a source of government revenue; and the mechanics of drawing. Economists have generally neglected to study the historical significance of lotteries. Friedman and Savage have suggested that the lottery may be a fruitful source of historical economic data; more recently, Aitken examined in some detail a large lottery firm which operated in the United States between 1821 and 1834. The purpose of this paper is to set down systematically quantitative measures of two essential lottery features: the inequality of the prize distribution and the actuarial value of the gamble. Some interesting historical comparisons can be made, and some hypotheses are suggested by the data which might be the subject of further research.

The lotteries of this study are restricted to those with cash prizes to lend some uniformity to the lottery terms and, from the consumer's point of view, to make all alternatives money incomes. The selection of the sample can best be described by giving a short history of English and United States lotteries.

Technological progress and investment are considered generally to be among the crucial determinants of economic growth; both have been prominent accompaniments of experienced growth. It seems likely that they are closely related, and a way of seeing this relationship is desirable. This paper seeks to develop a theoretical framework to help examine their roles in the growth of output, to show how they influence the paths which output and other economic variables trace out through time and to lead towards a more general theory of growth. However, no such general theory is developed. Many factors relevant to the course of economic growth are not considered, especially those concerned with what would happen if the economy moved away from full employment. Consequently, the analysis is not intended to be immediately relevant to actual conditions, but merely to throw some light on the relationships between technological progress and investment.

The analysis is related closely to the work of Nicolas Kaldor. However, the model contains a more flexible treatment of the effects of technological progress and the willingness to invest, in order that we may be better able to examine, in a less rigid framework, the effects of past courses of investment and technological progress on present developments in the economy. The variables of the model consist of a few aggregates expressed in real terms and we shall not be concerned with the method of their measurement.

This paper presents the first or exploratory phase of research in a study of the effect of invasion on the morale of a community. Although many studies have been made of spacial succession, and some of changes in social attitudes, there has been little attempt to investigate the relationship between these two phenomena, in other words, to show whether, or how, the solidarity of a group is affected by an ecological succession. The process of invasion has been described in connection with different areas of a city. The invasion of one section of a city by an outside ethnic group is a common phenomenon. The general pattern is that, with its first indication, the morale of the resident group strengthens, but eventually one point breaks, that is, someone sells out to one of the invaders. Then another gains a foothold—a house or a shop—and, once the area is well penetrated, both the invasion and exodus gather momentum.

This is a study of a large rural area in which the invasion has taken place over so long a period of time, and over such an extensive region, that the invaded population as a whole has taken longer to realize its significance. In this situation it is much easier to trace and observe the psychological effect of invasion on the invaded group.

The field of research chosen for this study was made up of the four counties of Compton, Richmond, Sherbrooke, and Stanstead in the Eastern Townships of the Province of Quebec. Interviews, practically all indirect, were obtained from the different sections—industrial towns, county towns, summer resorts, villages, and rural areas.

The life of the overseas Dominions in the past generation has been dominated by the related movements of democracy and nationalism. Here my concern is with a general and comparative treatment of the nature of Dominion nationalism and its influence on the relations of the Dominions to the outer world.

In some important and obvious respects nationality within all the Dominions has common features: it is a growth among immigrant peoples not politically severed entirely from the parent state, and not devoid of loyalty to the parent stock; it is mainly rooted in a culture derived from an older land, and draws inspiration from no wells of a past distinctive only to itself; it cannot in the nature of things nurture the sentiment of “we alone,” and it has not attempted to do so; it is expressed principally in a language common to two powerful world states, one of which has had a great literature for many centuries, and hence it has to be content only with such idioms of speech as local environment slowly brings. In all cases this Dominion nationality has a short history with the emotional shallowness of such. Its spirit is not steeped in the legendary glories of country and town. Unlike the small and intense nationalities of Europe, including the Irish, it rests its claims upon present achievements and future hopes rather than on reference to an epic past, or the tale of oppression suffered at the hands of another. In every Dominion it was both inspired by and expressed in the struggle of people for self-government and democracy, and the political institutions arid ideologies to which it is wedded have a common ancestry. It has arisen within Communities which grew big and prosperous quickly, thanks to a conjuncture of highly favourable world circumstances, notably the rapid industrialization which brought speedy benefit to frontier countries with rich natural resources and abundant land, countries linked to the heart of industrialism and world trade in the period, the British Islands. Related intimately to this circumstance was the Pax Britannica, or long era of relative peace secured by British sea power, which controlled the exits and entrances to the strategic seas and enabled the flow of people and capital, the unhampered occupation of wide territories, and the pursuit of the arts of peace to absorb these frontier communities, and thus achieve that sense of community expressed in their nationality.

In the decade following 1929 all currencies of the world, save the Albanian franc, have undergone either devaluations in terms of gold or exchange restrictions tantamount to devaluations. These changes reflect not only the depreciation of several originally overvalued currencies to equilibrium, but also a nearly complete round of successive depreciations of individual currencies to temporary undervaluation. Each such undervaluation has set in motion forces tending to restore equilibrium, through rising supply and demand schedules in the undervalued-currency country, falling supply and demand schedules in the overvalued-currency countries, counter-depreciation in the latter countries and sometimes adverse tariff action. The proportions in which the effects have been divided among these four channels have differed among countries; consequently with the end of the round of depreciations, the re-establishment of something like equilibrium of exchange rates has come about without having involved equal degrees of devaluation by all countries. Thus the new exchange rates differ from those of 1929 in many ways additional to those necessary to cancel the disequilibrium of that year. That, toward the end of this decade, something like equilibrium of the major exchange rates has been established, is indicated by agreements that sharply limit the possibility of further depreciations to under-valuation and even the possibility of depreciations to counteract over-valuations which may arise in the future from changes in international reciprocal demand, etc. It is now opportune to examine the effects of these depreciations of the past decade upon the prosperity of the countries concerned.