The poet Thomas Gray certainly did not have civil servants in mind when he penned the lines:

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure; …
Nor you, ye proud, impute to these the fault,
If Mem'ry o'er their tomb no trophies raise.

Nevertheless, his words seem to be a most fitting epitaph for those public servants who lived between 1840 and 1867 in the United Canadas. Our historians and sculptors have rescued most of our leading politicians from oblivion, but a great web of silence has been woven around the personalities and labours of our bureaucrats. It will be argued in this paper that this silence is quite unjustified. It will be argued further that this neglect of the civil service by our historians has resulted in the presentation of an incomplete picture of the attainment of responsible government in Canada. A third set of observations deals with the shadowy area dividing administration from politics, that is, dividing the ministerial head from his highest permanent advisers. Obviously this selection of topics is not designed to provide a comprehensive and complete survey of the state of our public services before Confederation. What follows is, rather, a series of impressions, deliberately undocumented, which are advanced as a basis for subsequent discussion.

The practice of criticizing political institutions on the basis of their efficiency as pieces of machinery is so widespread in political science today that it is sometimes difficult to remember that institutions may be as important for what they are as for what they do. An elected legislature, in its scrutiny of governmental affairs, not only represents the dominant sections of the electorate that returned it; it also reveals, through the nature of its own organization, their attitudes towards the elected legislature and its place in their society. An appraisal of the capacities and incapacities of a legislature would be at best incomplete if it paid no attention to the beliefs and traditions reflected therein, for it would ignore the obvious truth that the quality of the legislature's work was conditioned by its social environment. In the paragraphs that follow, the emphasis is not upon performance, although that is not overlooked, but upon the legislature as a social entity, as a mirror in which one can see an important part of a community.

The Canadian House of Commons during its early years offered the unusual and interesting spectacle of a legislature engaged in threshing out great issues while the legislative machinery itself was still under construction. Debates on important matters concerning the country at large ran parallel with acrimonious discussions about the nature and function of the House of Commons and its organization, and the government frequently tried (by providing, for instance, that each province was to obtain its due proportion of Commons' clerkships) to make the House a significant factor in the settling of disputes. Many institutions of the House (the speakership, the Hansard, and the Library, to name but a few) took their initial form as a result of forces which often bore little relation to legislation and debate.

This paper is concerned with the “General Possibility Theorem” of Dr. K. J. Arrow. Since the theorem is certainly elegant and probably important, it is proper as well as convenient to refer to it from this point on as Arrow's theorem. The theorem deals with the problem of discovering a rule by which social preferences can be constructed from individual preferences. Such a rule, or social welfare function, gives a social ordering of alternatives of any kind for every possible arrangement of the corresponding individual orderings. Arrow's theorem declares that no social welfare function exists that satisfies those conditions that most of us would consider essential to a satisfactory rule. The outcome is something of a shock to preconceptions.

In what follows two aspects of Arrow's theorem are considered. In the early part of the paper the theorem as such is examined. A brief and informal statement of Arrow's argument is followed by a formal statement of the conditions on which the argument depends. A proof of the theorem is offered that seems to be rather more naturally constructed than the original. A set of conditions is proposed (derived from Arrow's proof) that is weaker than the original set, that seems to be at least as plausible, and that leads to the same conclusion by a short and direct route. In the later part of the paper, methods of circumventing the theorem (there seems to be no way of removing it) are explored.

Multiple-employer collective bargaining includes all systems of bargaining in which representatives of a number of separate firms act as a group in negotiating with representatives of their workers. The group negotiations need not cover the whole content of the contracts signed by the participating companies, nor does the group action necessarily extend from negotiation to administration of the collective bargaining contract. The employers' bargaining unit may be of any size. Industry-wide bargaining is only one form of multiple-employer bargaining; characteristics of multiple-employer bargaining are also present, although sometimes less pronounced, in local or district bargaining systems.

A significant proportion of the collective bargaining systems in Canada are organized on a multiple-employer basis. The Department of Labour estimated that in 1946, 26 per cent of all workers under collective agreements were covered by agreements negotiated by associations or groups of employers. The ratio would be 46 per cent if workers covered by agreements extended under the Collective Agreement Act of Quebec were included. The relative importance of multiple-employer collective bargaining is probably much the same today.

Although philanthropy has been important in many societies, it is safe to say that it has never played such a prominent role, nor become such an elaborate part of the social structure, as it has in twentieth-century North America. Much has been written on it, particularly in recent years, and many reasons have been given for its development, but there has been little scientific analysis of it as a social activity, nor interest in its relations to the social order. The purposes of this paper are threefold: to trace the development of organized philanthropy since the beginning of the century in a Canadian city, here called Wellsville; to analyse how the philanthropic pattern has become elaborated and integrated into the structure of the community; and to assess the function which this organized activity fulfils for both the individual and various groups in the community.

Before the twentieth century, philanthropy in Canada was a haphazard affair, and except for the few individual donors who occasionally gave large sums of money for the cause of religion, health, or education, “giving” was mainly confined to the poor and indigent. Today vast sums of money are continuously being raised by the combined efforts of large numbers of voluntary collectors for an infinite number of purposes. Thus in a relatively short period of time “giving,” once the prerogative of the pious and wealthy, has become part of the common experience of a large proportion of the population of any modern city or large town. With the increase in giving has come the increased participation of many people in the actual work of collecting money through the media of highly organized, money-raising campaigns.

Many social theories have been called scientific, but no one has insisted more than Marx on the scientific nature of his system of thought. It is the purpose of this article to examine the ambitious claim of Marxism to be the only real science of society. Dialectical materialism may be omitted from consideration since it concerns not science but philosophy (or even metaphysics), and in any case it is the Marxist social theory, or historical materialism, for which the claim of science is most insistently made.

There is no need to give here the details of Marx's historical materialism. The main point to be kept in mind is Marx's assumption, lying behind the entire body of his theory, that history and society move according to a pattern of knowable laws, the so-called “laws of motion” of society; and that Marx claims to have done nothing more than to have laid bare these laws. If Marx is right he obviously ranks as the greatest social scientist of all time. If he is not right he is a misguided and fanatical genius who has led man's thought up a long blind alley.

A preliminary word on the application of scientific methods to the study of society may not be out of place. The purposes of study, whether in the natural or social sciences, are the same: to explain how, to accomplish a practical result, or to predict. These three criteria may also be used to test a scientific theory. There are of course certain special difficulties in the social sciences, difficulties arising (to select from many reasons) because of the nature of the data, or because inference may so easily be confused with fact, or because merely studying the behaviour of people and publishing the results may affect the very behaviour being studied.

The economic theory implied by the terms “New Economics,” “Douglasism,” and “Social Credit” rests on the plea that the present economic system is inherently defective; that capitalism has a “mechanical” flaw which assures in any given period a flow of purchasing power almost always less than the flow of prices. As a consequence there is a surplus of goods; a surplus, that is, only in relation to consumers' capacity to purchase and not in their capacity to consume. Major Douglas asserts that the deficiency of purchasing power is not periodic or accidental, but is chronic and ever present. He attributes the cause of the deficiency to the following factors: first, current banking practice which permits private banks to create and destroy credit at will; second, the process of saving and investment; and third, the difference of “circuit velocity between cost liquidation and price creation” which results in charges being carried over into prices from a previous cost-accountancy cycle. It has been pointed out repeatedly that each of these assumptions is of questionable validity.

In logical sequence to the hypothesis that capitalism produces a surplus of goods which consumers cannot purchase, Social Credit proposals for reform are designed to inject purchasing power into the consumption stream: in a word, to make consumption equal production. This can be achieved, it is stated, by introducing a “just-price” mechanism and by augmenting personal incomes through the issuance of “national dividends.” The “just” or “assisted price” is conceived as an arithmetic ratio (total national consumption over total national production) which is to be the means of deciding, from time to time, in what proportion the retail price level will be reduced.