Social Studies: I

LETTERS ~ CANADA: 1958 417 are some civilian scientists who believe that the entrenchment of D.R.B. is the only thing which has preserved defence research in effective operation. Nor does he give a clear answer to suggestions which have been made in some quarters that D.R.B. has tended, perhaps inevitably, to swing more towards development with a corresponding relative decline of research. Of interest to universities is the fact that D.R.B. is now spending nearly a million and a half dollars a year in grants to scientific research "extramurally," most of which is spent in the universities. It has thus been giving Federal aid to universities for ten years on a very large scale in a form which provincial autonomists have found acceptable. (RICHARD A. PRESTON) SOCIAL STUDIES: I Alexander Brady This annual survey of social studies must of necessity be highly selective. Even a decade ago it was feasible in these pages to discuss briefly every Canadian book of consequence in the field of social study. With the growing volume of publication such inclusiveness is impossible. One can only select the works of major significance, or those which seem to warrant special mention because they break into relatively untilled soil. Outstripping other studies in the current year for imagination and freshness is Arthur R. M. Lower's Canadians in the Making: A Social History of Canada (Longmans, Green, pp. xxviii, 475, $7.50). This is the work of a reflective scholar with a reputation already firmly established who here tries to fill an evident gap in Canadian historiography. The precise content of social history has been disputable, and at the outset he feels compelled to explain what he includes under the title, and certainly does not interpret it as history with the politics left out. He retains politics but puts it in a new and subordinate setting to that in conventional political histories. He illustrates his own conception in a contrast. "Economic history," he writes, "consists of the story of what man does to his environment, whereas social history has to do with what his environment does to man." An economic historian is interested in the raft of logs floated from the bush in the spring and the successive processes of its conversion into lumber. A social historian is interested in the new type of man that such activity produces. In brief Arthur Lower endeavours to illustrate the attitudes, beliefs, customs, and ways of life that Canadians as a people acquired in their evolution. He gives pride of place to the climate of opinion and sentiment, attempts to sketch a mental portrait of Canadians in the diverse and changing phases of their existence, and derives his illustrative data about them from a wide variety of sources, from their books to their sports, from their religions to their dissipations. Geography, economics, politics, and churches all in different ways helped to shape the totality of experience through which Canadians have gone and which has made them what they are. . Since this task is immensely difficult, it is seldom attempted. The limitations of evidence are obvious. Professor C. S. Lewis remarked that a historian is "less like a botanist in a forest than a woman arranging a few cut flowers for the drawing-room." What he knows of the past is very small compared with what was there. Yet the task should not be dodged, and few other Canadian historians are as well equipped as Arthur Lower to venture on it. He is not merely well grounded in fact and detail; he has also the ruminating and evocative type of mind needed. He is not concerned with drafting a vast catalogue of social facts, but with a personal interpretation based on the facts. All history, especially perhaps this type, must reflect its writer's cast of mind. Arthur Lower has never been frugal in expressing opinions, and it is hardly to be expected that all his many judgments here will command acceptance. There are readers who will think that he misses some major points, misrepresents some, and exaggerates others. But the positive qualities of the present work are manifest-ripe erudition, shrewd perception, and an easy and...