Notes

in the nature of a fight." Now such a statement could mean either much more or much less than it immediately appears to mean, but its general tendency is not lost upon the young. The rejection of rational thought - or rather of its dialectical basis, for no one rejects the supposedly "rational" conclusions of his own thought - on the part of the intellectuals is reflected, amplified, and taken by their students to its inevitable conclusion which, naturally enough, involves a rejection of the mentors themselves. To give only one minor example: a recent front-page editorial on university government in the Carleton student paper sneered at the faculty ("being members of the intellectual elite") for believing that "all things can be solved through reason rather than power struggles ." This is the real crisis of civilization. We should not be deceived into thinking that Correspondence The Editor, You are, I think, a little unkind in your criticism (Journal, November, 1970) of the governments concerned with the use of the War Measures Act in an unusual emergency. What has been done by the police and others since the emergency passed is a different matter. It is surprising that, as far as I know, the use of the War Measures Act in 1946, after Notes Peter 0 liver is Associate Professor of History at York University in Toronto. Walter D. Young is Professor of Political Science and chairman of the department at the University of British Columbia. He is author of the recently published Anatomy of a Party: The National CCF, and edits the quarterly B.C. Studies. John Ower is a member of the Department of English in the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. 64 the greatest threat to civility is posed by an ecological imbalance or an unjust distribution of power or an "apprehended insurrection ": the problem is more profound than any of these, and their solution will contribute nothing if something of prior importance is destroyed. The crisis of civilization is within ourselves and concerns our assumptions about the life of thought and the practice of rational discourse. It is the special problem of those of us who are involved in the work of the universities, whose primary concerns are the activity of our own minds and the activity of those minds whom it is our task to educate. And we will not be able to defend that which is the essence of civility unless we begin from an adequate notion of the nature of thought, which is a vital activity of a living and indivisible whole which is the mind. R.R.H. it had been invoked by secret Order-inCouncil in 1945, has not been referred to in any article, speech or letter during the past few months. I wrote a letter about it to a Toronto paper but am told it was not printed (I do not read the paper). The comparison is interesting. I think that murder and kidnapping are worse than spying. Others, I hope, will compare the methods used to deal with the two incidents, and assess their ultimate results. C. A. Ashley University of Toronto William H. New is Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, and Associate Editor of Canadian Literature. His study of Malcolm Lowry was published by McClelland and Stewart in 1970. James Lightbody is completing doctoral studies at Queen's University. Agar Adamson is a member of the Department of Political Science at Acadia University . Brian D. Tennyson is Assistant Professor of History at Xavier College, Sydney, Nova Scotia, and is a previous contributor to the Journal. Revue d'etudes canadiennes ...