Political science has not yet advanced, if indeed it ever will, to the stage where accurate measure of contemporary forces is possible; much less can it be used to predict the future. Since I deal with both the present and the future my remarks are largely a venture in political speculation rather than a discourse on political science. But I make no apology for the subject. Canada faces a difficult and dangerous future. It is our primary duty as citizens of a democracy to face the stark realities of the present crisis, and to attempt as best we can to assess this significance for our country. It is particularly the duty of those of us who by reason of our vocation can snatch time for leisured thought amid a world given over to violent action.

In the quiet days before Munich we were wont to classify Canadians who had anything to say about the external policy of their country as “imperialists,” “collectivists,” “isolationists,” or “traditionalists.” Few, if any, Canadians fitted neatly into these pigeon-holes, but the classification was convenient for distinguishing between different trends or schools of thought. But whether these were possible alternatives of policy in the pre-Munich days, it is obvious that they no longer have much validity. We have passed from the apparently static world of the twenty years' armistice to the dynamic world of the present. In war there can be only one foreign policy and that the vigorous prosecution of the war. In the post-war world our freedom of choice may be scarcely less limited.