The use of the term “territorial waters” herein is that generally applied in international law to the strip of water where the open sea washes the edge of the land territory of a state, within which strip the state has certain jurisdiction over its own nationals and those of other states. It does not include more extensive strips of water over which some states have asserted jurisdiction for certain purposes over their own nationals or in which, by treaty, adjoining states have asserted jurisdiction over the nationals of both.

There is no generally accepted rule of international law which may be regarded as universally applicable with respect to the right of dominion or jurisdiction over a particular belt of ocean adjacent to a country. It may be said at the beginning, however, that most countries have abandoned the old theory of Mare Clausum, under which coastal waters were sometimes fixed at sixty miles, one hundred miles, two days' journey, etc., from the shore, and under which claims were also made by agreement between two or more countries over an ocean common to them. In the decision of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague (1910), a member of the Tribunal referred to Selden's doctrine of Mare Clausum and to certain ancient treaties based upon it as “wild, obsolete claims over the common ocean which all nations have of old abandoned with the progress of an enlightened civilization.” In the early nineteenth century Russia claimed the Behring Sea as Mare Clausum. This was protested by Great Britain and the United States of America, and in treaties in 1824 and 1825 with the United States of America and Great Britain respectively, Russia recognized that “jurisdiction in the said Sea should be regarded as the reach of a cannon shot from the shore.” It may be of interest to note, however, that the theory is not entirely dead, for within even recent years Russia has applied it to the White Sea, with such effect that Norwegian sealing ships can no longer operate in this area.

Corrupt electoral practices and controverted elections are topics which might normally be expected to go hand in hand, for the latter usually result only from the former. To some extent, the number of controverted elections is a useful criterion by which to measure the prevalence of electoral corruption; but it may be a highly misleading one, as the corruption must be discovered and proved before any election result can be affected. The criterion is therefore trustworthy only in so far as the relevant legislative devices are effective. To the degree that laws providing for the investigation of electoral malpractices are operative, bribery and personation are discouraged; weakness in these laws, on the other hand, will inevitably stimulate unscrupulous candidates and election agents to utilize any opportunities which may be turned to their advantage.

No one who has even a nodding acquaintance with the tolerant attitude taken towards political behaviour generally in the years immediately after 1867 will be surprised to hear that for some time after Confederation the whole problem of corrupt practices and controverted elections was handled in a haphazard fashion. The four provinces which came together in 1867 agreed in general terms on a definition of corrupt practice: it included the giving and receiving of bribes, whether of money, employment, or anything else; the real or threatened use of violence; treating; personation; and in some cases payment for the hauling of voters to the polls. They also had similar views as to how action for corrupt practice should be begun (by a simple petition signed by either an elector or candidate), and had adopted somewhat similar ways of trying the actual election cases, though their procedures varied in detail. Thus the Assembly of the province of Canada had a general committee of elections, appointed by the speaker subject to the sanction of the House, which was charged with preparing two panels of chairmen and members from which election committees consisting of a chairman and four members were finally chosen. Nova Scotia and New Brunswick sent controverted elections directly to a select committee. Manitoba and British Columbia, when they entered the federation, used the ordinary judicial system and tried election disputes like other cases. In the provinces where committees of the assembly were used, the procedure was similar to that of a court: the committee members were sworn to uphold justice; witnesses were examined under oath; and the parties concerned were represented by counsel. It is to be feared, however, that judicial impartiality was noticeably absent in the rendering of verdicts.

There is already a good amount of scientific literature on the parish in French Canada. But this literature is almost exclusively concerned with the parish as it existed historically in the rural society of Quebec. Since the parochial structure was the main organizational frame of rural life and since the parish was identified with the local rural community, these studies have inevitably tended to be “community” monographs. The concept of the “parish” itself has been indiscriminately used to mean either an ecclesiastical structure, a type of social organization, an ecological unit, or a local social group.

The main intent of this paper is to offer a sociological clarification of the institutional nature of the parish. Our leading assumption is that the parish as an institution can be adequately understood only if it is, first of all, seen as an organizational element of the larger Catholic Church. Given this, one must start by analysing the essential features of the parish as it is conceived ideally by the Church. Having elucidated its ideal type as well as its written constitution, one can then evaluate more meaningfully the modalities of its functioning in varying concrete situations—its working constitution, as it were—and draw the line between its formal organization and the patterns of informal relationships that crystallize around it. Our analysis of the parish will be restricted to its structural aspects, viz. the established roles and the reciprocal hierarchical statuses which it implies, and this, in three main directions: the relationships of the parish official functionaries with their ecclesiastical superiors, with the members of the group within which they immediately operate, and with the total society. Only through such an approach can one succeed in our secondary purpose which is to compare the changes that the traditional parochial organization of rural French Canada has been undergoing in the new context of swiftly industrialized and socially heterogeneous cities. Since the larger part of the Canadian sociological literature on religion has been concerned with the non-institutional aspects of protest or erratic religious groups, such a study may bring a contribution to our knowledge of the social organizational value of established churches while incidentally also enabling us to re-focuss our theoretical thinking concerning social institutions.

It has become an accepted fact that the mode of livelihood of a people is related in a number of ways to other parts of their culture and to some elements of their character. Anthropologists have contributed, from their relatively simple data, the clearest statements of these relationships. They have also shown that the goals and motivations in primitive economy are usually multiple and complex ones, and are as distinctive of each culture as are personality, social life, art, and religion. This demonstration has a very direct bearing on the work of those charged with planning or carrying out a programme for the welfare of a primitive people, and because of the distinctiveness of each situation, the most fully satisfactory programme can result only from an. inspection of the actual nature of the people, their culture and their resources.

The relations of the economic to the non-economic life of primitive peoples are high-lighted when a primitive group comes into contact with western culture. As a result of this contact there follows a characteristic sequence of changes in the economic life of the primitive. First of all he adopts, quite readily and often eagerly, the usually superior tools and materials, and alters some of his techniques so as to use them efficiently. The product of his labour, however, he tries to use in the same manner as before. He wants to achieve the goals which hold meaning for him, and which harmonize with his tribal system of distribution and use, its social and political organization, its religion, art, and science. He wants an axe so that he can make a canoe in a month instead of a year, a gun to hunt with or to fight the same old tribal enemies, cloth to replace the less effective barkcloth or hide.

If it be true that every generation selects and reads historical evidence in the light of its own aspirations and anxieties, one should expect one's contemporaries to take some interest in, and show sympathetic understanding for, periods of social stresses and strains. Having passed through three and a half decades of political and economic upheavals, and having little reason for believing that the time of troubles has come to an end, this generation is likely to feel some affinity with past epochs that appear to have suffered from similar symptoms of a deep-rooted social malaise. Perhaps the historian may derive some comfort from the knowledge that his age is not unique in having to contend with what, in moments of despair, appears to be an adverse trend of a secular nature.

At one time or another during his studies every economic historian must have come up against questions that should have shocked him into a realization of the vast methodological difficulties of his subject. If, as the theorists insist, inter-personal comparisons of utility are illegitimate, how can the historian justify his practice of using such concepts as group welfare? If he cannot form aggregates, how can he hope to be able to compare the wealth of nations at different times? But even assuming that such comparisons were possible: do we have properly defined criteria of economic growth and decline, or of prosperity and depression? And if not, are we entitled to use these and similar ill-defined terms for the purpose of characterizing and contrasting different periods of economic history?

This paper is concerned with the political theory developed by Major C. H. Douglas, the English founder and leader of the Social Credit movement, and not specifically with the ideas of the Canadian Social Credit movement, although the English theory has had a continuous, if not always a decisive, influence on the Canadian movement. Since the Douglas political theory stems from the Douglas social critique we shall begin with the latter.

The frustration of the engineer by the business control of industry may be seen as the starting point of Major Douglas's social thinking. Deeply impressed by the waste of industrial capacity and potential, Major Douglas developed a sweeping critique of industrial civilization. A man of broad sympathies and with a professional view of his engineering calling, he saw that whatever held back the progress of science in industry made it impossible for the technologist to serve the people and give them the benefit of their heritage. He saw further that the concentration of power in the control of industrial production was only a part of a trend toward concentration of power in government, in trade unions, and in every institution which affected the life and opportunity of every individual both as worker and consumer. In his earliest writings his main concern was to expose this trend toward the submergence of the individual, to establish its pervasive nature, and to warn that it must be defeated if the human quality of civilization was not to be destroyed. His case was presented with restraint and with telling effect. His recommendation of a monetary device, which later became commonly identified with social credit, as the most probable direction in which a solution might be found for freeing men from the tyranny of concentrated power, was also presented with restraint in the writings of the first few years, and was subordinated to the main analysis. His point was that men could not be free in any other way until they had secured a freedom of choice, both as producers and consumers, and a level of material well-being which the existing system of production and distribution denied them. The economic system must therefore first be reformed. Socialism was not the answer, since it would mean still further centralization of economic and political power. Monetary reform was the answer because it could destroy the mechanism by which economic power was being increased and by which the material well-being and the freedom of the individual were being diminished. Always Major Douglas presented monetary reform merely as a means toward the end of establishing a new society in which human beings would be free to develop their individuality in a way that had never been possible before.