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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.

The expansion of the Niagara Peninsula has occurred with its advance from a frontier of conflict to one of contact. Lying at the western extremity of the Hudson-Mohawk, that "greatest of all routes of continental migration," it forms a major land bridge from New York to Ontario, and exerts the same attraction today, when it has become one of the chief international regions linking Canada with the United States, as it did in the mid-nineteenth century, when it formed part of the great overland route drawing immigrants to the West, or even earlier, when it was itself a pioneer zone. At the same time it is a prime water link between west and east, and, being used both by American and Canadian, has helped to bring them together, first in the commercialization of the St. Lawrence, and later in its industrialization. As a result it is one of the few districts of Canada able to show a continued native growth, together with a "pull on the northern margins of the neighbouring states at all comparable to that of the numerous urban and industrial regions of the United States."Thanks to these advantages, its population has increased fifteen times in the last 120 years, with an expansion in recent decades only exceeded by that of the early pioneer influx (see Figure 1). Its problems, therefore, are associated with growth, and with the attempts to work out a series of integrations with each new stage of development, in order to preserve equilibrium in expansion, and create new organizations of settlement and society. Its chequered history, especially as represented in the urban centre, has shown the varying success with which these issues have been met.

This study of urban building and real estate activity in Canada is concerned primarily with housing. It is part of a broader project stimulated by Silberling's thesis that among the various components of durable capital formation in the United States only investment in housing and in transportation have acted as prime movers determining the general level of economic activity. This paper falls into two parts, the first dealing with the nature of building and real estate cycles in selected cities in Canada, and the second relating these fluctuations to the growth and movement of population. Basic tables and brief notes on sources are included in an appendix.The top section of Chart 1 is an index of urban building activity in Canada from 1866 to 1946. This index reflects four and a half major cycles in the eighty years since the Dominion was established. The cycles are similar in many respects to those found by American students. This Canadian index, like those used to illustrate the long cycles in American building, is based on building permits issued in major cities, and has been adjusted to eliminate the influence of changes in the cost of construction. Table I compares upper and lower turning points in the index with those reflected in Mr. J. R. Riggleman's index of deflated values of urban building permits per capita in the United States.

The literature of scientific studies, either demographic, economic, or sociological, on Canadian families, is rather thin. Except for some valuable local monographs and theses interred in university libraries, one must rely almost exclusively on excellent but very few general studies of the Dominion Bureau of Statistics. Among such are the 1931 Census monograph on the Canadian family, the 1937-8 national survey on the Canadian family income and expenditure pattern and, more recently, the remarkable series of studies by Dr. Enid Charles on the trends and differences in Canadian family size as revealed by the last Census of 1941.The French-speaking part of Canada geographically concentrated in the Province of Quebec represents, within the Canadian context, a culturally and politically conscious social structure. At present, this society, owing to rapid industrialization and concomitant adjustments, includes areas and communities of all the possible transitional shades from the solid, old-settled, rural type, to the more complex, dynamic, and urbanized variety. Studies of French-Canadian families in any of these differentiated areas are also scarce. The traditional type of French-Canadian rural family has been ably studied by the Canadian sociologist follower of the Le Play School of Social Science, Léon Gérin, especially in his monograph entitled the Habitant de Saint-Justin. More recently, Horace Miner scientifically analysed for the first time, the relationships between land and the family in rural Quebec. Both of these studies stress the following basic features of the traditional rural French-Canadian family: a high degree of familism and of internal solidarity, a fundamental functional relationship with the tenure system of large family-ownership of the farm as well as with a peculiar pattern of land inheritance which consists in the passing of the whole farm, undivided, to only one inheriting son in each family.