Tonight I am going to exercise the prerogative of the President to make an address to a large extent unornamented by the extensive documentation and citations which perhaps too often go by the name of scholarship. My primary theme is our immigration policy. In developing this, I am going to deal mainly with the period from 1896 to 1910, since that is the period over which policy shifted from one at least theoretically laissez-faire to the selective policy inherent in the Immigration Act of 1910. My method will be to consider for a space the characters of two men, to follow that by narrative and analysis respecting the changes which occurred and then to draw together what seem to me to be the morals of the story.

When Clifford Sifton took over the Ministry of the Interior in the autumn of 1896, entry to Canada was proscribed to three classes of persons only: the diseased; the criminal or vicious; and those likely to become public charges. Even these might find entry not too difficult if they went the right way about gaining it. The controls exercised under the law by the Minister covered only entries by ocean ports and here the general assumption was that only steerage passengers were immigrants. There was no control over those who entered by railway. Once immigrants coming by steamship had passed inspection and had become “landed immigrants” deportations were administered by the Department of the Interior with the assistance of the Department of Justice and generally on complaint of the municipal authorities. It was only after Clifford Sifton had left the cabinet in early 1905 that a sequence of events occurred forcing a series of restrictive measures which were finally embodied in the Immigration Act of 1910.

Any attempt to assess the direction of social change in a particular society is a risky business at best. Yet, inasmuch as sociology, in its official texts on method, rests its claim to scientific status on its predictive capacities, it must somehow, sometimes, take this risk and say something about what are the significant changes occurring in the social organization of a society. In order to achieve any such general assessment the social analyst needs, it seems to me, to consider the society as a whole, and through time.

Sociologists are generally reluctant to view the whole of a society as a proper subject of study and reluctant also to study social phenomena through time. Indeed, what is at present felt to be adequate methodology, or should we say prestigeful methodology, requires living respondents whose answers can be given statistical treatment, and therefore becomes largely irrelevant for studies with historical dimensions; and while it may be quite useful in measuring change it is quite helpless of itself to account for it. Furthermore its preference for piecemeal and detailed verifications makes it a rather awkward instrument to use when dealing with general analyses. Anthropologists, by tradition, have commonly achieved such analyses in the case of less complex cultures. Even they, however, when confronted with large societies, have tended either to adopt the sociological habit of narrow investigation or to postulate that an image of the larger whole can be gleaned through the minute study of a particular instance, a particular cell such as a village, or a town. In choosing the first alternative, they abdicate what seems to have been a traditional objective of anthropology. In the second case, they stand in danger of missing the target through oversimplification.

“Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.” Lionel Robbins' well-known definition of their subject is one which most economists would probably accept, at least as a description of their workaday activities. The definition allows—and it was specifically framed by its author to allow—for the pursuit of other ends than purely material ends; but in practice economists devote themselves predominantly to the study of the allocation of material means between ends conceived and defined in material terms. Inherent in the way economists set about their task is the implicit assumption that material means are scarce and material wants are pressing—in short that economic society is materially poor, and resources must not be wasted.

This assumption permeates the theoretical apparatus of the subject; it also directs what economists have to say about economic policy. In the debate which has been going on over the general problem of inflation, for example, economists have been divided between those who stress the loss of production and potential growth of output that results from anything less than full employment of labour, and those who stress the loss of production and potential growth of output that results from the misallocation of resources brought about by inflation. Again, in making comparisons between the Russian and Western economic systems, economists have generally tended to accept as their standard of performance the rate of growth of output per head, a standard which gives away most of the positive points on the Western side. In both cases, the adoption of the output standard implicitly assumes that the economic problem is of prime importance.

In discussing the formulation of the programmes presented to Canada by the Liberal and Progressive Conservative parties in the general election of 1957 I shall pay little attention to the substance of what was offered. My concern will be almost exclusively to seek out the ways in which the platforms were formulated, and to draw some conclusions in the form of a hypothesis concerning the role of Canadian parties in reconciling the sometimes opposing pulls of our cabinet and federal systems.

For more than twenty years one party had been in, the other out, of power: this circumstance necessarily made for profound differences in the way in which each shaped its programme before and during the campaign. The Liberals did little more than point to their record. The central theme of their campaign was that the party had done well in the past and, if returned, would continue doing equally well in the future. The Liberal programme, such as it was, was that of the Government. Not fashioned to suit the exigencies of the 1957 election, it had, in the main, evolved gradually as the consequence of the continuous interaction of the cabinet and the leading experts in the civil service.

The cabinet contains representatives of the various provinces and major regions of the country, yet departmental responsibilities make it difficult for the leading ministers to be fully sensitive to the varied shifts of opinion within the party. It is perhaps possible to make too much of the distinction between the cabinet and the party in the cabinet system: the cabinet is composed of the party leaders. But there seems to have been a tendency for the Liberal party, so long in power, to leave much of the formulating of policy to the leaders who could utilize the skill and knowledge of the civil service. Much of what had, in the years immediately before the election, been called Liberal policies or the Liberal programme was actually the product of the intimate co-operation of leading civil servants and their ministers.

The mode of succession has long been recognized as one of the principal factors in determining the stability of a given political system and a key datum in the analysis of power relations within such a system. Essentially, the problem can be stated as involving (a) the technique of choosing a successor to a political leader, and (b) the successor's legitimization in the legal, traditional, or charismatic sense. This paper will deal primarily with the technique of succession in the Soviet system, touching only marginally on the question of legitimization. While drawing analogies from the post-Lenin succession crisis, the paper will attempt to identify the factors that shaped the nature and the course of the post-Stalin power struggle and the technique that ensured Khrushchev's victory over his rivals. Needless to say, limitations of evidence have introduced a considerable speculative element into the discussion, and some of the generalizations are therefore, at best, only tentative hypotheses that will have to be tested against such empirical evidence as may become available in the future.

Although modern constitutionalism has largely resolved the problem of succession by legally defining the technique of succession and making the technique the criterion of legitimacy, the very nature of the totalitarian dictatorship that emerged in Russia after 1917 precludes a constitutional solution to the problem. “… dictatorship,” Lenin wrote in 1920, “means neither more nor less than unlimited power resting directly on force, not limited by anything, not restrained by any laws or any absolute rules.”

The recent reissue of the classic study of Middletown by Robert S. Lynd and Helen M. Lynd should serve as a suitable occasion for a partial re-examination of a great landmark in community research. It is not necessary to elaborate on the significance of the Middletown studies. Although more than twenty years have elapsed since they were completed, they are still widely cited in contemporary writing. Moreover, a closer examination of the Lynds' treatment of power distributions in Middletown discloses striking similarities between this early study and the most recent work in the field. Modern writers might disclaim the openly Marxist position espoused by the Lynds, but in fact many of them continue to be strongly influenced by the scheme of analysis employed in the Middletown books. In this paper I propose to examine the Lynds' discussion of community power in both its normative and descriptive aspects, not simply because it seems valuable from time to time to return for curiosity's sake to the wellsprings of modern social science, but also because many of the issues discussed by the Lynds, and many of their findings, have contemporary relevance to the study of community power.

Scattered through two large and meaty books, one can find at least two approaches to this subject. One approach suggests in unmistakable terms what the Lynds believe ought to be true of power in the community; the other describes what they believe is true. I refer to these incorrectly, but for convenience, as “theories” of community power.

One of the most fundamental of democratic rights is the right to representation in a free parliament. A legislature which is in a position to prolong its own life indefinitely can nullify that right.

That is why the United States Constitution lays it down that there must be a general election for the House of Representatives, and for one-third of the Senate, every two years. Nothing except a constitutional amendment can change this; and the process of amendment is so elaborate and difficult, and takes so long, that we can be certain that there will never be any lengthening of the term of either House of Congress unless American public opinion emphatically and overwhelmingly desires it. The same is true of the individual states. If Congress or any state legislature tried to prolong its own life, the “act” would be void, and any citizen could have it annulled by appealing to the courts.

In Canada, the Dominion Parliament can prolong its own life, but only “in time of real or apprehended war, invasion or insurrection” and only “if such continuation is not opposed by the votes of more than one-third of the members” of the House of Commons. In other words, one-third plus one of the members of the House of Commons can prevent prolongation even in the midst of war, invasion, or insurrection. Any extension “act” passed contrary to these provisions would be void, and any citizen could have it annulled by appealing to the courts.

Our subject concerns the dialogue held between English financiers and Canadian politicians and the response of Lombard Street to the calls of the Province of Canada over the last ten or fifteen years of its existence. Its scope is limited because of the limited array of materials surveyed. The intention is to review some of the correspondence between the financial agents in London and the Canadian ministers or other officials entrusted with English money through the agents. The materials comprise some two hundred letters, a few duplicates of which can be found in the Baring collection at the Public Archives in Ottawa, which the author was fortunate enough to peruse at Glyn, Mills & Co., Lombard Street, London.

These fragmentary materials have been marshalled back into the conventional framework of Canadian economic history, where in the author's estimation they belong, in order that they might shed some more light on matters already known. The role of the agents in money matters exerted a remarkable influence on Canada's political affairs, to the extent that the presence of the English investor implied some kind of participation in the decision-making process of the Province of Canada. The English press may have exerted a similar influence, since it reflected the attitude of those financially interested in Canada, whether directly or indirectly.

Not all of the difficulties that the Province had been through in the last decade of its existence can be traced back, however, to its financial connection with the English money market. Indeed, several problems arose from its commercial structure, its precarious trade pattern upon which the neighbouring states exerted a continuous pull, the deflated expectations of Canadian traders as regards the western trade, and the over-all modification of trade channels which accompanied the cotton revolution. Yet we have chosen here to single out one factor—the opinion of Lombard Street—by way of suggesting the importance of market forces in the shaping of Canadian economic policies.