During the past two hundred years students of public affairs have been stimulated to an exceptional degree by the very evident radical transformation of life in human societies. Some have observed, named, and analysed the changes in material goods, building up an impressive structure of economic science and culminating in the popular controversy over capitalism and socialism. Others have investigated man's cultural development, though with less success in naming the elements being studied or in defining the units of measurement or valuation, but reaching a general climax of opposing nationalism to cosmopolitanism. The greatest number of observers, however, have been concerned with political changes, for if politics is not truly the queen of sciences, it has at least been thought to be so from antiquity on. Whether the subject is more difficult than others or whether too many have rushed in without appropriate training or adequate consideration of the subject-matter, it must be admitted that the heavy hand of tradition has lain heavier on political analysis than on other fields of knowledge. Students of politics have continued to use the historic names of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, discussing constitutionalism (polity, the old composite form) in Greek terms with modern instances such as checks and balances, separation of powers, fundamental law, etc. In popular controversy, however, the line of dispute has been drawn between democracy and dictatorship, which are also concepts derived from antiquity.

Which candidate ought to be elected in a single-member constituency if all that we take into account is the order in which each of the electors ranks the various candidates? The most reasonable answer, I think, is that that candidate ought to be elected who, on the whole or on the average, stands highest on the electors' schedules of preferences.

At the very outset of the argument we try to move from the is to the ought and to jump the unbridgeable chasm between the universe of science and that of morals. Some discussion of this step should be given, even though it does no more than point out the assumptions under which the jump is made.

We assume that, in a constituency which is to elect a single member, we know the order in which the candidates are ranked on the schedule of preferences of each elector. If the electors had only been allowed to cast a single vote and the record of this was all the information at our disposal, inevitably, I think, we would have to conclude that the candidate most deserving of election was the one with the greatest number of first-preference votes. As against this, however, our assumption will be that each elector expresses his attitude to each of the candidates in the field, and that we have this record of the electors' attitudes.

Within recent years significant additions have been made to the theory of the multiplier in its application to the study of income movements among economic systems. It is the object of this paper to introduce a graphical method into the analysis of the bi-system multiplier, to develop a generalized formulation of the bi-system multiplier of which the formulas presented up to now are special cases, and to indicate a variety of uses (in addition to the familiar use in foreign trade problems) to which the concept may be put.

Malthus's Investigation of the High Price of Provisions, hitherto available in Canada only on microfilm, is a pamphlet well worth republication here both for its topicality and its economic content. Many of Malthus's views on inflation, particularly his discussion of opposing theories, have direct application to current economic controversy. And while the late Lord Keynes, with that excess of generosity which he reserved for the underdog in academic debates, seems to have exaggerated the extent to which Malthus here expounds the principle of effective demand, the pamphlet does anticipate several important elements of the modern theory of income determination.

The Investigation was written in a hurry—in much the same way as a modern British economist takes time from his academic pursuits to dash off a quick pamphlet setting the public straight on some problem of grave national importance. It records, Malthus says elsewhere, “an idea which struck him so strongly as he rode on horseback from Hastings to Town” that he stopped two days in his “garret in town,” “sitting up till two o'clock to finish it that it might come out before the meeting of Parliament.” As a result of this rapid writing, it is clear, incisive, and delightfully personal, in the manner of the first Essay; by the second Essay, for reasons of his own, he had reduced his style to a pedantic verbosity almost worthy of Adam Smith himself.