I have little to add to this discussion for the simple reason that my colleague, Dr. Coats, has said much of what I wanted to say, said it more interestingly, with a Dorothy Dix touch which I, in my academic restraint, cannot give, and also said it with more authority because of his long and distinguished public service. I can do little more than underscore a few broad propositions.

My first proposition is an emphasis upon the basic fact that public administration is the administration of the state, and not simply the administration of individual departments of government. It has to deal with the management of the state in its aggregated activities, and hence broadly with the whole subtle art of government. The tone of that management never depends simply upon what industrious and zealous civil servants in their offices may do, or how they may do it, but, among other things, upon the effective organization of parliamentary committees, the conscience and intelligence of their members, the modes of planning parliamentary work, and even the quality of discussion within the conclaves of parties, or the antics and verbal orgies of the demagogue in public debate. The genuine and profitable study of public administration in a democratic state cannot be narrower than the broad frame of government, if we are to appreciate duly the ultimate end sought—the competent management of the state. One phase of national government, designated by text-book writers as the administrative, cannot logically or wisely be isolated from other phases which in turn determine its character. To the institutions of general government must be applied those principles and axioms concerning organization which Henri Fayol, Major Urwick, Mary Follett, and many others, with varying wisdom and clarity, have done much to elaborate.

My research interest in the settlement of the new North-West dates back to the summer of 1929 when I was asked to make a preliminary study of the Peace River Country which was one of the “Frontiers of Settlement” studies published during the first half of the nineteen-thirties. During the following summer the field study was completed and the Settlement of the Peace River Country was published in 1934. This study made familiar to the author the Alberta and British Columbia divisions of the Peace River region from Notikewin, seventy-five miles north of Grimshaw through the settlements of the Peace as far west as Fort St. John. Among many communities studied in this survey were Notikewin on the north-east fringe of settlement and Dawson Creek which forms the southern anchor of the Alaska Highway. The opening of the Alaska Highway, built between 1942 and 1944, together with the oil developments along the MacKenzie River and the mineral production of the Precambrian area just east of it, focused attention on this new North-West. The possibilities of settlement in this far north-western territory have received wide publicity. Among others, I spent the summer of 1944 in this great stretch of territory, which lies north of the Peace River and extends from a line drawn from Waterways to Coronation Gulf on the east, (approximately the western boundary of the Precambrian Shield), to the Alaska Highway on the west. The northern boundary of the territory studied is the Arctic Ocean. My own part of this survey included also that part of Alaska served by the Alaska railroad and the highway network which lies between Fairbanks and Anchorage.

Economic theory has been powerfully advanced within the past decade by its new interest in national income and effective demand, and by its attention to the bearing of such magnitudes as savings, investment, consumption, and money holdings upon the aggregate employment of resources. After the first impact of a revolution, however, the signs of continuity with the past are bound to re-appear. In the field of economic doctrine it may be confidently expected that continuity will be established by exploration as to how particular equilibrium conditions—under the diverse situations of competition, monopoly, oligopoly, and the like—help to account for the behaviour of those large aggregates with which the “modern” theory has too exclusively dealt. With equal confidence one may expect that this synthesis of Marshallian and Keynesian theory will cast new light upon the problems of economic policy.

Fortunately, however, it is not necessary to await the full fruition of this cross-fertilization of ideas: its main features are already indicated in a very substantial field of agreement as to policy in all but the most extreme wings of economic thought. The language of popular discussion in America epitomizes this field in two cardinal ideas—the necessity of government action to secure full employment and the desire nevertheless to preserve a private enterprise system. To extremists on either side these ideas represent incompatibilities. But the effectiveness of economics and of economists in the current scene is primarily conditioned upon the elaboration of policies compatible with both of these cardinal requirements.

By “The Social Sciences and Public Administration,” the title assigned me by Professor Clokie, I am assuming he meant “Special Teaching in the Social Science Departments of Canadian Universities for Students Contemplating the Civil Service as a Career,” which is both more definitive and (being of eight words or over) even long enough for copyright. It is to “lead off” a symposium on “Training for Public Administration,” a vasty frame of reference indeed, taking in (some might go so far as to think) a course in the great school of Practical Politics itself.

Insinuating this role upon me, Professor Clokie pointed out that I had been a long time in the Public Service, and was now a teacher in a university. It is the logic of the redoubtable Pott, Mr. Pickwick's editor-friend, on Chinese metaphysics—an impregnable logic, says Mr. Bernard Shaw. In my case, however, whilst I was undoubtedly in the Service a long time indeed, at Toronto I am only what is called a “Visiting Professor,” i.e., one who lectures merely on what he knows, and can be let out at any time. Moreover, that new flower, the Course in Public Administration, which (again in the search for the particular) seems to represent a fortiori the “special teaching” aforesaid, was unknown in my generation as a student, and late-blooming in my generation as a civil servant. But one must not let one's style be cramped, and today therefore I take it as a sort of text, if only in the grand manner to which educationally speaking so old-fashioned a civil servant is accustomed.