Suchergebnisse

The time is, I think, opportune for introspection by Canadian social scientists. The present is a transitional period in the life of the nation. Five years of war have profoundly altered Canadian society: Canada has become a great industrial nation; the paternalistic state has arrived at least at adolescence under the stimulus of war; for the time being the Canadian people have become military-minded, a condition which may well continue into the peace in view of the shift of world power in favour of North America; everywhere social values hitherto accepted are under fire, and traditional folkways have been rudely disturbed; new social goals are being raised and new patterns of life are being established.It is probable also that we are in a transitional stage in higher education. At any rate Canadian universities, like other social institutions, will be compelled to adjust themselves to the changed conditions of the post-war world. One condition likely to obtain is an increasing interest in the social sciences, if for no other reason than the increasing demand for social technicians to manage a paternalistic society. It is not improbable also that Canadian society faces a prolonged and acrimonious, if not violent, debate on social objectives. Under these conditions I suggest it is of first importance that social scientists should have firm opinions as to the nature of their calling, both with 'a view to guiding educational expansion, and assisting them in deciding their personal responsibilities in a distracted world.

Political science has not yet advanced, if indeed it ever will, to the stage where accurate measure of contemporary forces is possible; much less can it be used to predict the future. Since I deal with both the present and the future my remarks are largely a venture in political speculation rather than a discourse on political science. But I make no apology for the subject. Canada faces a difficult and dangerous future. It is our primary duty as citizens of a democracy to face the stark realities of the present crisis, and to attempt as best we can to assess this significance for our country. It is particularly the duty of those of us who by reason of our vocation can snatch time for leisured thought amid a world given over to violent action.In the quiet days before Munich we were wont to classify Canadians who had anything to say about the external policy of their country as "imperialists," "collectivists," "isolationists," or "traditionalists." Few, if any, Canadians fitted neatly into these pigeon-holes, but the classification was convenient for distinguishing between different trends or schools of thought. But whether these were possible alternatives of policy in the pre-Munich days, it is obvious that they no longer have much validity. We have passed from the apparently static world of the twenty years' armistice to the dynamic world of the present. In war there can be only one foreign policy and that the vigorous prosecution of the war. In the post-war world our freedom of choice may be scarcely less limited.

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.