In the many volumes written on the “agrarian question” in Mexico, probably no subject has received as much attention as the ejido, village communal land. Whether polemical or objective, most of these works have been concerned with the ejido primarily in economic terms. Questions have been raised about its importance as an economic unit, government action to improve its output, and its reform or even abolition for economic reasons. Related studies have been concerned with the ejido in terms of social justice, that is, the extent to which and the ways in which the ejidatarios, members of the ejido, have benefitted from the revolution. A few studies have been sociological or anthropological in nature, examining the ejido in terms of how it reinforces or breaks down traditional social and cultural patterns. While utilizing the data presented in these various studies, this note is concerned with the political aspect of the ejido or more specifically, how the ejido is a device which, both alone and in conjunction with a subculture of poverty, allows political control to be exercised over a vast peasant population engaged for the most part in primitive agriculture while urban Mexico proceeds with industrialization.

In the early 1920s George McCutcheon McBride insisted in his major study of Mexican land tenure patterns that the Indians had to be kept on the land.

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.

The generalization of Walter Bagehot that successful administration “depends on a due mixture of special and non-special minds” has lost none of its importance with the passage of time, for the problem of combining competent administration with democratic control is more urgent today than ever before. Bagehot contended that the Cabinet Minister, the “non-special mind,” served a double purpose: he not only enabled a democracy to control the civil service, but he also made a genuine contribution to its administrative efficiency. The specialized civil servant, if left to his own devices, tended to become narrow in outlook, careless of the public convenience, and restricted by departmental routine; and the important secondary function of the Minister was to correct these failings by supplying a fresh mind and a different point of view.

The government of Great Britain still furnishes, as in Bagehot's time, the best practical application of this principle, and the high standards maintained by many of the departments bear testimony as to its essential truth. The need for this interplay of “special and non-special minds” is perhaps best seen in the history of the War Office, a department which by its very uniqueness in several respects presents in exaggerated form both the difficulty of the problem and the virtue of the remedy. The War Office is thus considered not merely as a sample department, but one which places, as it were, a magnifying glass over the general problem of departmental administration elsewhere.

I Have been asked, before introducing the speakers, to take a quarter-hour to pay tribute on behalf of this Association to the memory of the great economist whose life and work are the subjects of this evening's meeting. I propose to use these few minutes to inquire very briefly into the philosophy and characteristics which made Lord Keynes so great a human being, perhaps as nearly a whole person as the twentieth century can show us.

In a recent article Mr. Harrod has expressed the conviction that Keynes had a more distinguished mind than Ricardo. There is food for reflection in the fact that Ricardian thought developed along two quite different lines, one through the so-called Manchester School and the other through the Christian Socialists and Karl Marx, and that Keynesian influences are already showing a similar bifurcation. On the one hand, we find developing a stereotype labelled a “Keynesian,” presumably preoccupied with unemployment, with a simple philosophy based upon the possibility of management of the economic macrocosm through monetary and fiscal means. On the other hand, we find Marxists claiming Keynes and non-Marxists repudiating him on the ground that the “philosophic implications” of his “doctrines” are Marxist in nature.

With respect to the first line of development, it seems to me that Keynes's devotion was to ends rather than to means, that he viewed means always as experimental, and that it is a central conviction in his personal philosophy that we do not know how human beings will react to a change in environment. For that reason, and also because circumstances alter with the passage of time, we must be prepared always to alter economic modes, or even to “reverse a process” which has been initiated. This is not the philosophy of the Keynesian stereotype.

Since well before the turn of this century economists have been attempting to explain the phenomena associated with pricing in the transportation industry. Of recent years this subject has received both descriptive and prescriptive treatment at the hands of welfare economists. In the course of this paper it will be argued that the current descriptive theory is based upon a fundamental misconception of the nature of transportation output and that, in consequence, the policy prescriptions, even when they are right, are usually right for the wrong reasons.

As a starting point it will be useful to recall a controversy which began with a journal article, written some sixty years ago, in which Professor Taussig was endeavouring to show that railway rates could be fitted within the framework of general price theory. He argued that the wide differentials which were apparent in the railways' charges for their services could be explained by the preponderant influence of joint costs. If this were true, the rates charged for output A would be the consequence of passive adjustments in price to changes in the output of B in response to changes in demand for the latter product. Actually Taussig argued that the commodities transported (e.g., coal and copper) were sold to different consumers and should be treated as different products. Many years later the criticisms of Professor Pigou precipitated a lengthy debate over the validity of the joint cost doctrine, Pigou contending that railway output was homogeneous and measurable in units of ton-miles.

One of the great elements of stability in the British constitution has been the sovereignty of parliament. The fact of parliamentary sovereignty has given the British constitution a flexibility which has enabled it to serve the changing needs of different periods by modifying the inflexibility of the common law by direct changes in positive law. Even before the period of deliberately created law the fiction of the king's conscience enabled the courts of equity to introduce an element of peaceful change into the legal structure of England.

The supremacy of the will of parliament involved in the notion of parliamentary sovereignty presupposes two things. Firstly, it assumes a single supreme legislature, and secondly it assumes the superiority of legislation over the will of the courts. If, as Walter Bagehot contended, the efficient secret of the British constitution lay in the almost complete fusion of the executive and legislative functions, it equally depended upon the supremacy of the legislative branch over the judiciary. It was no abrogation of that theory that it was the business of the courts to determine whether the subject was bound by the words of a particular expression of the will of the legislature. That was merely a protective device against an administrative abuse of power. What that theory cannot logically contain is the notion that the courts could say that the legislature was or was not exceeding its powers in legislating. For by definition those powers are unlimited.

For seven days in July 1981 the politics of the Polish United Workers Party remained in the centre of attention of international media. The IXth Extraordinary Congress of the PUWP produced an unprecedented atmosphere of drama and suspense. When it was over, its importance was heralded by terms such as “a watershed,” and “a historic turning point.”

This study challenges the claim that foreign-owned firms do not differ significantly from Canadian-owned firms with respect to political donations. Tests for association and correlation show that overall, foreign-owned firms are significantly less inclined to contribute money to Canadian parties. Behaviour varies according to nationality, so that British firms are most likely to contribute, followed by Canadian and then American companies. Japanese firms are least likely to contribute.

In the literature dealing with the role of the press in Canadian politics one dimension which has attracted the attention of a number of commentators is the effect that chain ownership of large metropolitan dailies may have on influencing the amount, type, and interpretation of news disseminated to the public. The issue of the effects of chain ownership has been examined empirically in the United States, and studies confirm the hypothesis that chains do indeed influence the editorial positions of member newspapers. This note examines through content analysis the effects of chain ownership on editorial treatment of issues, political institutions, and political leaders in the context of the 1974 election.

The article first presents the broad outlines of a recent work of the author. It shows that Social Credit was a movement long before it became a political party, a fact which offers the opportunity to present a brief history of the Social Credit phenomenon in Quebec. This political movement is defined as a protest movement, and its ideology is that of the right in the sense that it makes its appeal particularly to conservatism, with a view to preserving a social and economic order threatened with disappearance. One can distinguish three phases in the evolution of the movement: a mobilization phase, a consolidation phase and a phase of institutionalization. For each of these phases there is a corresponding type of leader. Moreover factionalism acts as the catalyst of change of the movement from one phase to another. The last part of the article presents and discusses the recent developments of Social Credit in Canada and in Quebec. Two different choices appear to be available to the party: to radicalize its appeal as a movement of right-wing protest, or to modernize its ideology in such a way as to become a moderate party of the centre right. Finally the Creditiste phenomenon is examined as a particular species of a broader genus which would include the Parti Québécois as well. One could therefore apply to the latter the same type of analysis that was applied to the Creditiste phenomenon.