The long delay in making peace and in economic reconstruction threatens to bring upon the world an acute scarcity of United States dollars. Countries overseas, particularly on the continent of Europe, have not made the progress in production and exports which would make possible the balancing of their transactions with dollar countries, except at levels so low as to be ruinous to world trade and a most serious threat to the prosperity of North America. In this situation Canada's role is a dual one. We share with the United States a productive power enhanced by war; other nations need our products in replacing war's destruction; to countries overseas Canadian dollars are as scarce as American dollars. Yet when the United States looks abroad at the ranks of the countries to whose need for American dollars it must seriously attend, Canada is to be found in the line-up.

The familiar features of Canada's economic structure, together with American commercial policy, have conspired to bring it about that our trade with the United States, while naturally greater than with any other country, is an unbalanced one; we buy there more than we are permitted to sell. We must sell others more than we buy from them and use the proceeds to settle our debts in the United States. We are dependent therefore upon the free convertibility and a high value of sterling in New York. When sterling has fallen there, so has the Canadian dollar; when the convertibility of sterling into American dollars has been restricted, rigid control of the use of American dollars has been forced upon us. Thus important policy decisions may well await us in the not too distant future. It is appropriate therefore that we should look again at our past for possible guidance.

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.

I Was asked to write a paper about “Keynes in Cambridge,” to supplement two other papers about his work as a public servant and as an economist. I am glad to do this, but let me explain at the beginning the limits of my qualifications. I worked under him as an undergraduate for two years, 1928 to 1930, and I saw something of him on three later visits to Cambridge in 1931,1934, and 1936. I saw him again in the United States several times during the war when he was representing the Government of the United Kingdom in financial discussions. From all this you will gather that I cannot claim for a moment to have been an intimate friend. Nevertheless I understand I am supposed to write in a rather more personal vein than those who are reading the other papers.

Let me begin by talking, about Keynes as a teacher. During the years in which I happened to work under him, 1928 to 1930, his thinking on monetary theory was changing. These were the transition years between his traditional quantity-theory-of-money approach, in his Tract on Monetary Reform published in 1923, and his novel savings-and-investment approach, in his Treatise on Money published in 1930. He put forward his new ideas in a series of eight lectures—one a week for one term. Obviously the lectures had to be highly condensed and, despite the pleasantness and clearness with which they were delivered, I doubt that many undergraduates got very much out of them. However, they were not primarily intended for undergraduates; Keynes was trying out his new ideas on anyone who cared to listen, and there was always a group of his fellow dons at his lectures, as well as some graduate students who were still rather rare in Cambridge.

The General Theory was written “with the object of persuading economists to re-examine critically certain of their basic assumptions.” In accomplishing this purpose it has been completely successful, for it has influenced a very large proportion of the economic writings, not only professional but popular as well, that have been published during the last twelve years. The purpose of this paper is not to attempt to predict the place in the history of economic thought which it will eventually occupy but rather to point out some of the fields in which its effects are already obvious and important. These effects are attributable on the one hand to its timeliness and on the other to its form and content.

In one sense its timeliness is obvious: during the twenties and thirties in Great Britain, and during the thirties in many other countries as well, unemployment had been severe and prolonged. But it was timely in a more general and significant sense. Many other shocking things had happened, too, and it may not be out of place to recall a few of the familiar details of the British setting. Britain had come through the war victorious and had proudly hitched the pound sterling to gold at the old par of exchange; but London was no longer supreme in international trade; in the early thirties it had fallen to a discount even in time of peace. Income from foreign property had diminished. International trade was decreasing in importance. Taxes were heavy; landed estates were being dismembered; naval supremacy was impaired; the formerly well disciplined English labourers now well organized had staged a general strike; tastes and technology were changing rapidly. In the east, in Russia, a new economic order had arisen; and in the west the United States had become the dominant power in wealth and productive capacity. In the past these things had occurred within a generation.

Of the forty years of his working life, John Maynard Keynes spent approximately eleven as a public official. These years of public service were broken into three widely separated and differing periods. Of the first two, I know no more than does most of my audience. The Keynes of the third period I had some limited and intermittent opportunity to observe.

The Civil Service was Keynes's first choice as a career—or at least as the beginning of a career. Not achieving the first place necessary for the Treasury, he was assigned to the India Office where he remained from 1906 to 1908. John Morley was the secretary of state for India and the permanent secretary, Sir Arthur Godley, was an experienced and skilful administrator. I mention John Morley because it is well to remember that Keynes knew and understood Morley's generation though the Keynesians do not. I mention Godley because it was under him that Keynes acquired his knowledge of the workings of government and of the official's point of view. He was never thereafter completely an outsider as far as the government service was concerned. There too began his interest in Indian currency and finance which bore fruit in his Essays and in his work as a member of the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance in 1913. To this period too may perhaps be attributed his readier knowledge of India than of the Dominions.

No apology need be offered for continuing the discussion of either civil liberties or emergency powers, exhausting and exhausted as the topics may now seem to have become. The very fact that such wide interest has been aroused by the agitation conducted by defenders of civil liberties in recent months indicates a growing realization that there is something at stake here requiring careful consideration and alert watchfulness. Whether one views civil liberty as flowing from numerous aspects of a well-balanced constitutional system of government, as the present writer does, or as the special area of distinctively designated fundamentals laid out to-protect individual rights, as many of the most vocal libertarians seem to do, every person must recognize the peculiar and intimate relation subsisting between civil liberty and constitutionalism. The preservation of the liberty of the subject is the distinguishing feature of all systems properly called constitutional and marks them off quite definitely from all forms of arbitrary government, no matter how the latter may be designated politically, socially, or economically. And at the present time no one can fail to observe that the unregulated and uncontrolled exercise of emergency powers constitutes one of the most serious threats to civil liberty as long understood and that it poses a most difficult problem for the constitutionalist.

It is unnecessary to enter here upon any consideration of the nature or elements of civil liberty; still less is it necessary to embark on a defence of liberty or to ask why freedom matters. Liberty has been claimed on so many grounds —religious, rational, economic, national, and ethical—and has spawned such a volume of defences, from Milton's Areopagitica to Laski's Liberty in the Modern State, that one is entitled to assume that adequate exposition has been made and the goal denned in general terms acceptable to all sharing the historic concepts of western civilization. Nevertheless, it ought to be noted that the very same sources from which libertarian doctrines emanate are also quite frequently the springs of its repression, namely, some religious dogmas, some economic doctrines, some national cults, and social gospels of various types.

The country town, like the country village, has usually been considered not only as a part of the rural community but as its centre. The existence of division and even antagonism between town and country has not been ignored, but it has been discussed as something which ought not to be. This has been the result of at least two errors into which sociology frequently falls. One of these is forgetting that many of its easy dichotomies, such as that beween rural and urban communities, are merely logical constructs. They are tools which are at times useful in the analysis and interpretation of data; they are not immutable truths. The second error is setting sociology up as a normative rather than a scientific discipline. General sociology is beginning to outgrow this, but rural sociology is still strongly disposed to describe the ideal rather than the actual. In point of fact, throughout the United States and Canada, especially in times of rapid social change, the town of a few thousand people and the farming district around it have not formed a single community; they have been distinct and often hostile social entities.

The town-country rift is especially wide on the frontier because of the different speeds with which the two types of community respond to new social conditions. On the farming frontier the small town is the representative of the old order of things, the rural community the representative of the new. In the early Canadian settlements, this fact was made very evident by the gathering of British government and military officials in the towns. The farmers in a recently settled region are pressed toward radicalism by the demands of the new environment and by temporary necessities arising from frontier conditions; they are cramped by the old system, and begin to strive for reform. The townsmen are farther removed from the situation to which the old ways do not provide a tolerable mode of adjustment; they are, to a greater extent than the farmers, in the position which Veblen ascribed to the leisure class, a position “sheltered from the action of the environment.”

The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (C.C.F.) movement in Saskatchewan is the first avowedly socialist group to win an electoral majority in any province or state of Canada or the United States. Many have expressed surprise that a socialist party should have won office in the most rural province in Canada. This paper is an attempt to throw some light on this question through a study of the leadership of the C.C.F. as compared with that of other community groups and political parties in that province.

The significance of the growth of the C.C.F. party can best be expressed in economic class terms. The movement has two important aspects. Essentially, it represents the latest historical phase of the almost continuous conflict of the western grain farmers of the United States and Canada with eastern business interests. Secondly, within the province, success of the movement has resulted in a political transformation in which the representatives of the rural majority supported by the working class of the cities and towns rejected the political control of the urban middle-class business and professional groups which dominated the Liberal and Conservative parties and the government of the province.

Since 1901, the farmers of the West and of Saskatchewan in particular, have been attempting to reduce the hazards of a one-crop wheat economy which is perennially subject to extreme fluctuations in income, as a result of the variability in grain prices and climatic conditions. At the turn of the century, Saskatchewan farmers organized the Territorial Grain Growers' Association (later the Saskatchewan Grain Growers' Association) to force the Canadian Pacific Railroad to provide loading platforms and freight cars for their wheat.

The ideological weakness of modern liberalism has long been recognized as one of the more striking features of contemporary politics. Although constitutional democracy has on the whole proved rather more successful than totalitarian government in satisfying the ordinary needs of men, its achievements have generally failed to arouse a great deal of enthusiasm. In comparison with the aggressive self-confidence of communists and fascists, the attitude of contemporary liberals is notoriously defensive and pessimistic. What are the causes underlying this curious failure of liberal morale? To what extent can it be attributed to deficiencies in the theoretical structure of modern liberalism? These questions must be of interest to anyone who is concerned with the problems of contemporary political thought.

When substantial accomplishments fail to evoke enthusiasm, it is reasonable to suppose that those accomplishments are being measured against standards which in some way or other are alien to their nature. A good deal of the weakness of modern liberalism arises out of the fact that it insists on judging the achievements of constitutional democracy, an essentially pluralist system, in terms of standards which are still largely absolutist in character. Liberal government depends in practice on the existence of a multi-myth, multi-group society. Policy is determined not, as in totalitarian countries, by imposing the will of a homogeneous ruling group upon the rest of the community, but by a process of parliamentary negotiation between the supporters of widely varying points of view. In a society of this sort, the coercive functions of government are necessarily limited by the claims of rival individuals and groups.

By “agricultural policy” I mean the pattern of those acts of government, especially of national governments, which specifically concern the agricultural segment of society. The discussion of agricultural policy, like that of any other social problem, involves all the social sciences, perhaps one should say all the sciences. Economic analysis, dealing as it does with a limited range of abstractions, cannot pretend to give an “answer” to any social problem, agricultural policy included. Sociological, political, legal, historical, psychological, technical considerations obviously enter into the discussion. Nevertheless it may be useful to ask what are the insights yielded by economic analysis, as a discipline of thought and as a system of related propositions, in approaching a problem of this degree of generality. The case for economics, or for any other discipline of thought, is the case for specialization. The problems involved in the study of even so relatively simple a problem as agricultural policy are beyond the wit of any single mind to explore fully. To appreciate the problems of agriculture fully one would need to be an economist, sociologist, political scientist, social psychologist, biologist, chemist, physicist, botanist, zoologist, and much more; and in these days no one man can hope to be expert in all fields. The only way in which we can even begin to encompass any problem is by specialization; but, according to what is almost the first proposition in economics, specialization is useless without exchange. The aim of this paper is a little intellectual trade, a small offering of an economist to other disciplines, in the hope perhaps of some enlightenment in return.

The statistical analyses of representation in the Canadian House of Commons which follow are based on a file of approximately 2,200 cards, each card representing a Canadian member of Parliament. The file covers the entire period from 1867 to the present, the following information being sought in each case: name, date and place of birth, party affiliation and electoral record, constituencies represented, occupation or economic interests, religion, education, previous experience in municipal or provincial politics, and career after leaving the House of Commons. Some of this information, such as names and constituencies represented, was readily obtainable from official sources, and much of the rest was equally accessible in such reference books as the Canadian Parliamentary Guide, Who's Who, etc. Some of it, however, such as the “post-M.P.” career of a man who did not attain the Elysian fields of the Senate or the Bench, was difficult and often impossible to secure, for most reference books of biography show a regrettable tendency to drop names from their pages unless the individual concerned is continuously successful in his career. Defeated or retired members are for this reason often hard to trace, unless there is some justification for their prominence as a citizen other than their political undertakings. Another point on which it has been impossible to find satisfactory data is that of members' education.

The maintenance of a satisfactory relationship between the financial resources and the responsibilities of a government is one of the most fundamental problems of all states. The difficulties are greatly complicated in those states in which a central government shares its tax resources and its responsibilities with local administrations. The complexities reach their peak in federations where central, provincial, and municipal governments all have strong traditions of independence, all draw their revenue from sources which overlap to a greater or lesser degree, and all compete for the support of the same voting public. As there develops a recognition of the nation-wide and not merely the local significance of such services as schools, roads, welfare services, etc., it becomes increasingly necessary for each local government to keep its services up to a level not too far below the accepted national standard. As the cost of these government services increases, an ever increasing proportion of the wealth of the community must be diverted to these uses and the point is eventually reached where the less wealthy communities are unable to raise the tax revenue necessary to maintain an acceptable standard.

Two conflicting courses of action offer themselves as possible solutions to such a situation. On the one hand there has been a movement toward larger administrative areas and toward centralization of services under the control of the authority operating over the larger area.