Few public men in Canadian history have so represented the spirit of their age as did William Lyon Mackenzie, and particularly during the pre-Rebellion stage of his career. This was the age of Catholic Emancipation and the Great Reform Bill, the age of Bentham and Byron, of Cobbett and Edinburgh Reviewers, of O'Connell and Huskisson; the age when the bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe triumphed over the last of the Bourbons at Paris, and when “King” Andrew Jackson succeeded the Adams dynasty at Washington. On both sides of the Atlantic the new wine of liberty and democracy was bursting the old bottles of restriction and privilege. Across the Atlantic the new stocks were of the vintage of the French Revolution or from the vineyards of Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham; on this side it was largely “home brew” of the frontier. But there was still on hand much of the vintages of 1688 and 1776, neither of which had lost its power to stimulate men. In the 1820's and 1830's William Lyon Mackenzie was the principal purveyor of these various wines of liberty to the backwoods colony of Upper Canada.

The decision to hold a meeting of the Imperial Conference in 1937 while its members are attending the king's coronation, is strictly in accordance with precedent, for in the past these conferences have been frequently associated with Empire ceremonies on a grandiose scale. The first Conference, indeed, owed its very existence to a gathering of this kind, when the colonial premiers who had assembled to honour Queen Victoria at her Jubilee in 1887, met together to discuss informally topics of general imperial interest. The Conference of 1937 will thus celebrate not only the coronation of the new king, but its own golden jubilee as well.

The somewhat haphazard venture of 1887 proved to be so successful that it was followed by another meeting at the time of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee ten years later, and a third Conference met when King Edward VII was crowned in 1902. Whether the pomp and panoply of Empire on these occasions were calculated to stir the emotions and give the colonial delegates an increased sense of solidarity and power, or whether the lavish hospitality was supposed to generate a conciliatory spirit and a willingness to forget inter-imperial differences, is not known; but such things have been suspected and frequently alleged. The real reason was doubtless much more simple and not nearly so sinister, namely, the prosaic one of convenience, combined with the British readiness to exalt accidental occurrences into useful precedents. At any rate, the Imperial (it was originally called Colonial) Conference was speedily adopted as a useful device to secure discussion and co-operation in an Empire where the centrifugal fofces were gaining in strength at an alarming rate.

During the last fifteen years carefully prepared population forecasts have appeared for nearly every important country possessed of reasonably adequate vital statistics and census records. With the general recognition of essential differences between the behaviour of bugs in a bottle and homo sapiens “in leaky national containers”, the usual procedure in the more recent studies has been to isolate the principal component factors in population growth, predict the future trend in each, and thus estimate the probable population ten, twenty, fifty, or more years hence. Already the majority of even the more conservative forecasts are proving too high and almost invariably because of over-estimation of the birth-rate.

Errors of this sort are not unexpected in view of the inherent difficulties of the problem. Their number is legion; it will suffice to note three. First, there is the difficulty of foreseeing changes in the social and particularly in the economic environment. Even in so-called normal times, each year brings unanticipated and sometimes substantial modifications in the complex of social forces making for greater or smaller rates of population increase. The duration and severity of such abnormal phenomena as the present depression are, of course, incapable of measurement in advance. Second, the nature and extent of human reactions to environmental change vary greatly both from country to country and from time to time. How a particular people will behave in a new situation is, therefore, usually a matter of considerable uncertainty. This uncertainty is in part at least attributable to a third difficulty. While many excellent studies, especially during the last decade, have contributed materially to a more adequate understanding of the forces controlling population growth, the existing state of knowledge still falls appreciably short of permitting precise quantitative measurement of many important influences on the birth-rate.

A sorry state of affairs was discovered by the Newfoundland Royal Commission of 1933. This article is a review of its Report. No attempt is made to describe subsequent events or to consider the actual results of the publication of that remarkable document. These matters are treated elsewhere. Here we are only concerned to disclose its substance and to criticize its arguments and recommendations.

The immediate cause of the appointment of the Commission was financial. The government of Newfoundland was unable to meet its obligations. At the end of 1932 the governments of Canada and the United Kingdom had arranged an advance to save Newfoundland from default and a further advance had been made by the United Kingdom on the following first of July (p. 55). This explains why the Commission was appointed by His Majesty on the advice of his ministers in Canada and Great Britain, as well as in Newfoundland. The commissioners were Lord Amulree, a British lawyer with wide experience of official investigations and industrial conciliation, raised to the peerage under the Labour government of 1929-31; Mr. C. A. Magrath, whose most outstanding work had been as chairman of the Canadian section of the International Joint Commission; and Sir William Stavert, who had “had the privilege of establishing the first Canadian Bank, the Bank of Nova Scotia, in the island” (p. 29), whose later banking connections had been with the Bank of Montreal, “bankers of the Government” (p. 45), and who had become in 1932, on the recommendation of the latter bank, the government's “financial advisor” (p. 55). The secretary was Mr. P. A. Clutterbuck of the Dominions Office; and two other British civil servants were also assigned to assist in the Commission's work (p. 233). The whole of the terms of reference consists in the few words: “To examine into the future of Newfoundland and, in particular, to report on the financial situation and prospects therein” (p. 1).

The new system of government inaugurated in Newfoundland on February 17, 1934—Government-by-Commission—is a constitutional experiment of the utmost importance to the people of the country, and, moreover, of profound interest to the student of political science. It possesses distinctive features which are unique in even the long and varied constitutional history of the British Commonwealth of Nations.

The process of economic deterioration, which had been almost continuous in Newfoundland since 1920, culminated in an acute financial crisis in which the government of the Dominion found itself confronted with imminent bankruptcy. At this juncture, a Royal Commission was appointed on the advice of the governments of the United Kingdom, of Newfoundland, and of Canada, to investigate conditions in Newfoundland, and to issue a report on its financial situation. The Commission, under its chairman, Lord Amulree, examined hundreds of representative witnesses, and published, on October 3, 1933, an exhaustive, courageous, and admirably lucid Report.

It would be presumptuous for a Canadian to comment critically on the affairs, of Newfoundland—particularly as a native of a country which has done its share of bullying a small neighbour and of a country which can scarcely point the finger of scorn on grounds of bad government. Charges of corruption heard in Newfoundland fall on attuned Canadian ears—and it would probably not be difficult to find specific instances of scandal in the history of government in Canada which would match those of Newfoundland.

Nevertheless a student of the economic history of both countries may be forgiven for reflections suggested by comparisons and contrasts. In common with other maritime regions, Newfoundland throughout her history has faced the sea, and she has been the last to feel the effects of the pull of the North American continent. The railroad from St. John's to Port aux Basques brought her in direct touch with North America viá Sydney. Canadian bankers assumed control in the island after the crash in 1894. With the turn of the century the steel mills of Nova Scotia began to draw on the iron mines of Wabana. While British industrialism penetrated Newfoundland in the construction of paper mills, it was significant that Cornerbrook on the west coast was sold to International. Industrialism, particularly as evident in transportation, linked Newfoundland more closely to the continent, to mention only the demands for coal and oil.

Since the War imprecision has been the common characteristic of most statements on foreign policy by Canadian prime ministers. In this the prime ministers of Canada have not been unique. As Mr. Harold Nicolson has pointed out, though “the essence of a good foreign policy is certitude” and though “an uncertain policy is always bad” yet “on the other hand, parliamentary and press opposition is less likely to concentrate against an elastic foreign policy than against one which is precise. It is thus a grave temptation for a Foreign Minister under the democratic system to prefer an idealistic formula, which raises only intellectual criticism, to a concrete formula which is open to popular attack.”

Canadian political leaders have been vague about the principles of their foreign policy, not only because of a shrewd calculation of political interest (the fact that a forthright statement on foreign policy would lose more votes than it would gain) but also out of regard for the national interest. There are deep divisions in the Canadian nation—divisions arising out of race, religion, section. These divisions are likely to be deepened—over the short-run at least—by facing the Canadian people with the necessity of choosing between a number of clearly defined policies on external affairs. For Canadian foreign policy, as Mr. Mackenzie King has recently pointed out, is concerned with the problems which arise out of “the unparalleled complexity of our position as a member of the league, a member of the British Commonwealth of Nations and one of the nations of the American continent”.