The Humanities in Canada by Watson Kirkconnell; A. S. P. WoodhouseReview by: E. K. BrownThe Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science / Revue canadienne d'Economique etde Science politique, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Feb., 1948), pp. 117-119Published by: Wiley on behalf of Canadian Economics AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/137661 .

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Reviews of Books 117

Professor Hugon is able to see all economic doctrine as "doctrine," because he himself seems unaware of the methods of great analytical rigour that have been introduced (to a large extent by the Frenchmen Cournot and Walras, both of whom he barely mentions), and of the success of this method in providing objec- tive and scientific, if limited, knowledge about the workings of the economic system. Economics is a technical discipline, as well as a speculative social philo- sophy. Indeed, until a student is a master of the techniques of analysis, his essays in broader social theorizing will prove superficial and meretricious. No student will advance his knowledge of the techniques by reading this book. He will be left unaware that economic theory is a technical and rigorous discipline.

B. S. KEIRSTEAD

McGill University.

The Humanities in Canada. By WATSON KIRKCON NELL and A. S. P. WOOD- HOUSE. Ottawa: Humanities Research Council of Canada. 1947. Pp. 287. ($2.00)

THE social sciences and the humanities are interdependent as instruments of education and as areas of research. One group of studies cannot attain its ideal stature if the other is underdeveloped; and the humanities have been ailing in Canada as in the United States for at least a generation. The interest aroused by the Kirkconnell-Woodhouse report will benefit the social sciences, whether the interest appears in the press, in offices of foundations, in academic councils, or in the flinty hearts of administrators and governors.

The report is as full and factual as if it had emanated from a Royal Com- mission. It reposes on a solid base of information, collected by elaborate ques- tionnaires, correspondence, and travel by teams of investigators the length of the country. When the committee (Messrs. Kirkconnell and Woodhouse assisted by Father Gerald B. Phelan, M. Maurice Lebel, and Mr. John E. Robbins) had compiled information and formulated provisional conclusions and recommendations, a tentative report was circulated, and revised (in some signi- ficant ways) in the light of suggestions received. The methods adopted were scholarly and indeed exemplary.

The report opens with a survey of the historical development of higher education in the humanities in Canada. The body of the book is a survey of conditions in the immediate present: in the high schools; in the English-speak- ing universities, first the pass and general courses, and then the work in hon- ours; in the French-speaking colleges and universities; in graduate schools, French and English; in relation to library facilities, to research, and to aids to scholarship. Appended are accounts of progress in such special disciplines as drama, music, and the fine arts. A substantial chapter offers proposals for re- form and expansion; and this is also the burden of the preface, an eloquent document in itself.

Although this is not the place to summarize the facts so carefully assem- bled, a few objections and doubts may *not be out of order. More than forty

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118 The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science

pages are given to lists of scholarly publications and projects. It is inspiriting to see the list of publications; but the projects are in many instances admit- tedly far from completion; and some of them will almost certainly never be completed. To introduce so many projects is to suggest that the state of re- search in the humanities is much more opulent than the facts warrant-it is to present a picture that is significantly inaccurate. At a number of points there is lack of acquaintance with present tendencies in American education; some- times there is serious distortion as when on page 146 the "American ideal of research" is contrasted with the ideal of "philosophic enquiry and a free play of mind." The opposition has become illusory and since it tends to complacency has an element of danger. In the first chapter (p. 23) the reader is referred to appendix C for a series of articles on leading Canadian humanists not men- tioned in that appendix. In general, however, the presentation of facts, and the standards by which the facts are judged, deserve grateful commendation.

It is by its recommendations that the report should primarily be judged. For undergraduate instruction the crucial recommendation is for greater breadth. The committee protests against "a too rigidly professionalized under- graduate prescription, where specializing departments have gradually insisted on a monopoly of the student's time." The need is recognized for courses which cut across departmental lines and present details not for their own sterile sake (sterile to the undergraduate) but as illustrations of significant generalizations. The recommendation is courageously applied to specific instances. The appli- cation to honours courses is sometimes timid. It is rightly felt that the honours courses are the distinctive excellence of the Canadian undergraduate scheme in arts and sciences; but the recognition of their excellence from some points of view should not conceal the desperate narrowness to which some of them have come. It is the honours students who are the chief victims of greedy depart- ments bent upon monopoly. I was myself a victim, and shall never cease to deplore the premature, excessive, and eccentric specialization of an honours course at Toronto. That course, Modern Languages, has been somewhat im- proved by tinkering; but tinkering is a superficial palliative.

For graduate instruction the recommendations are many, highly ingenious, and in the main admirable. They are shaped by a devotion to ideals, and yet they are never unrealistic. A national graduate school at Ottawa as the apex of education in the country is wisely rejected. It is realized that some progress, but no solution, might be attained if each university developed the area of study in which it is already distinguished. Great stress is laid upon exchange of stu- dents and of staff. Visiting appointments of two kinds are recommended: those of the usual kind, in which a professor visits another institution to reside for a year or a half-year; and, where distances permit, as they do in most eastern universities, appointments by which a professor would continue to do his usual teaching at home, and come to another institution to conduct a seminar once a fortnight. The remarks upon the need for grants in aid for research are specially pertinent at a time when academic salaries are even more inadequate than in more usual circumstances.

The only objection to the recommendation for graduate instruction is that

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Reviews of Books 119

they do not repose upon much speculation of the aims of such instruction. Instead they assume that the present aims are adequate, and that the trouble lies in conditions that prevent in whole or in part the accomplishment of these aims. Everywhere in the United States there is a profound concern with the inadequacy of present aims. It is significant that the Program Committee of the Modern Language Association of America, one of the most conservative, not to say hidebound, organizations in the country, has suggested that papers should in future bear on problems of philosophic significance rather than on arid lonely details, and should be addressed to the general community of scholars rather than to a half dozen specialists. The ideal of a graduate school as an induction to the general community of scholars is worth pondering in Canada before graduate studies are given new instruments and appendages for fuller develop- ment.

E. K. BROWN

The University of Chicago.

The Road to Nationhood: A Chronicle of Dominio-n-Provincial Relations. By WILFRID EGGLESTON. Toronto: Oxford University Press. 1946. Pp. xvii, 336. ($2.50)

"THIS is an attempt," says the author in his foreword, "to report and summarize the story of Dominion-Provincial relations chiefly on the financial side; it does not pretend to be a critique of federalism by a political scientist." In a sentence, Mr. Eggleston reviews his own book. It is a reporting job covering the histor- ical background of Confederation, the strains and stresses in the constitutional system which emerged progressively, the crisis of the nineteen-thirties, and the great diagnosis by the Rowell-Sirois Commission, the unsuccessful conferences of 1941 and 1945-6, and the recent tax agreements with most of the provinces.

In his first three chapters Mr. Eggleston sketches the familiar background of Canadian federalism through the work and the recommendations of the Rowell-Sirois Commission. The remaining three chapters, comprising more than half of the text, describe the conferences of 1941 and 1945-6 and the asso- ciated negotiations regarding tax agreements. The author takes most of his material from the public record, particularly the printed proceedings of the public conferences of 1941, August, 1943, and April, 1946. He quotes extensively from the statements of the leading political figures at these meetings to show the positions which they took. Nearly all of the last chapter of 100 pages is de- voted to a summary of the debate at the final open conference of April 29- May 3, 1946. The book concludes with a few pages regarding the new Dominion proposal of June 27, 1946, for separate tax agreements with the provinces.

As reporting, particularly of recent events which have been somewhat buried in voluminous records, this is very good, and the reader will be grate- ful to Mr. Eggleston for a good connected account of a confusing series of de- velopments. But all the story is not here. For instance, what happened in com- mittee during the period between the open conferences of August, 1945, and April, 1946? What developments took place in certain provincial governmental

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