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LETTERS IN CANADA: 1950 279 SELECTED TITLES PUBLISHED PLAYS. COWAN (1. B.ยป Number five Cheyne Row (Vancouver, Rose, Cowan and Latta, x, 128 pp.). DAVIES (ROBERTSON)' At my heart's core (Toronto, Clarke Irwin, viii, 91 pp., $2 cloth, $1.50 paper) . TAYLOR. (S. A.). The happy time : a comedy of love; based on the stories by ROBERT FONTAINE (New York, Random House, 184 pp., $3). PLAYS PRODUCED. ALLAN (ANDREW), Narrow passage (Toronto, New Play Society). CALLAGHAN (MORLEY)' Going home (Toronto, New Play Society ). COULTER (JOHN), Riel (Toronto, New Play Society) . DALE (ERNEST) trans., Plautus, Rudens (Toronto, Ontario Classical Association, 1949). DAVIES (ROBERTSON), King Phoenix (Toronto, North Toronto Theatre Guild). DOYLE (WILLIAM ) . Days of grace (Ottawa, Canadian Repertory Theatre ). GREEN (A. C.), Love story (Winnipeg, Winnipeg Teachers' Dramatic Society) . HOOKE (H. M. ), Time of grace (Kingston, Queen's Summer Theatre). MACMILLAN ( NORMA), A crowded affair (New Westminster, B.C., 1949). TAYLOR (MARION), Rumplestiltskin (Ottawa, Junior Theatre of the Ottawa Drama League) . IV. SOCIAL STUDIES A. BRADY Notable in the social studies of the year is a group of closely related monographs within the general field of politics. Four volumes appear on those agrarian movements of revolt which occurred mainly in the West and issued first into agrarian parties and finally into the contemporary Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, the chief rival of the two traditional national parties. These studies of tension and change throughout the prairie region in the twenty-odd years after the First World War throw light, not merely upon party politics in the limited sense of the tenn, but upon the difficult operation and peculiar vicissitudes of federalism and indeed upon the whole federal tissue of Canadian society. They are: The Third Force in Canada: The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, 1932-1948, by Dean E. McHenry; Agrarian Socialism; The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation in Saskatchewan, by S. M. Lipset; The Progressive Party in Canada, by W. L. Morton; and Henry Wise Wood of Alberta, by William Kirby Rolph. The first two are by American scholars and illustrate further the comment in last year's survey on the rich contribution which American scholarship is making to an understanding of Canadian life. In addition the publication of some of the other studies has been rendered possible by generous grants from American foundations to the Canadian Social Science Research Council and the Canadian Institute of International Affairs. It is not inappropriate in this context to pay tribute to this abundant American largess. The Third Force in Canada is the more general and least specialized of the four books. In it the author, who is a professor in 260 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY the University of California, seeks in simple terms to describe and analyse the development of the C.C.F., which has been built partly on the pattern of the British Labour party, but adapted to the needs and aspirations of a North American community. He enthusiastically views it as a middle way between the extremes of reaction and revolution , testing "the compatibility of the politics of democracy and the economics of socialism." After a brief introductory chapter on origins, he proceeds in a clear and easy manner to describe the party's national and provincial structure, its links with trade unions and agrarian groups, its critics from the left and the right, its electoral fortunes, its parliamentary methods, its administrative record in Saskatchewan, its broad objectives, and its likely future. More intensive and hence in certain respects more illuminating is the study by Dr. Lipset, who confines his careful investigations of the C.C.F. to the one province in which the party came to power. While the territory of his research is thus restricted, Dr. Lipset does not limit the depth of his inquiries or the range of his interpretation. The C.C.F. in Saskatchewan is for him primarily a phase of North American agrarian radicalism, perhaps the most conspicuous achievement of that radicalism, and why it has proved to pe conspicuous he examines in detail. The farmers of this province, like those in the neighbouring United States, who in the past had constituted the most active army of Populism, earned their living by producing grain under...

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