This being the first meeting of the Club devoted to methodology, we are following a rather consistent tradition among economists of being mainly interested in economic problems, not in the problem of what economics is. Fifty years ago John Neville Keynes wrote the Scope and Method of Political Economy and since that time only one full book in English, that I know of, has been published on this topic—Lionel Robbins's The Nature and Significance of Economic Science.

If I seem to adopt a tone of finality upon matters concerning which we all speak with equal authority, excuse it as the necessary brevity to avoid a tedious repetition of “it seems to me” and “in my opinion.” The ideas presented are all simple, one-cylinder ideas, meant as an introduction to discussion and presented, not by an authority but by someone who, like you, is an economist and needs occasionally to pinch himself and say, “What manner of man am I?”

The first thing that should be stressed about economic method is that it should be economic method, not methods. It would be bad to think of method as deductive or inductive, for the interrelation is too close. For an economist, the division is fatal. Put them in different stalls and there is no offspring.

Deductive is the often criticized a priori reasoning. If demand is constant and elastic, what happens to total revenue when price is cut? Answer: total revenue increases.

Charles Merz, editor of the New York Times, once observed that there is nothing like a good murder for giving the nation something on which to test its moral values. He had in mind, of course, the newspaper accounts of murder, seeing that most citizens, even in a thrillingly wicked place like Chicago, must be content with getting their murders at secondhand. On occasions of murder and other exciting events, the newspaper functions as a social conversation.

In these times, when virtually everyone reads newspapers, there are in every large city several sorts of journal to satisfy the demands of several types of reader. At one extreme is the newspaper for the least literate level of society. It reflects the very ordinary man's tastes. It can always be identified by the conspicuousness of its sporting news and the quantity of news pictures, comic strips, stories of radio and film stars, and the whole gamut of current fads and fancies. For the ordinary man, be he a street-car conductor, janitor, sales clerk, or factory worker, may in his tastes in newspaper reading be called the complete layman. If his paper seems to consider crime and the movies more important than anything else, it is because it is seeking the widest possible market for itself, by catering to the greatest common denominators of interest. Men whose daily occupation calls for little thought or learning, whether in this country, in England, France, or Germany, are prone to look upon the newspaper as a diversion.

Let us start by comparing the Mackenzie Corridor with that great Canadian highway the St. Lawrence. In the sixteenth century the latter offered the obvious means of entry into the new land of Canada. The pioneers could not have realized the cluster of large towns and cities which was to arise along the great waterway; but most of them were sure that the St. Lawrence would always be the main surface route whereby the resources of eastern and east-central Canada would be reached and exploited. Hence all detailed accounts of the geography of this area in the early days are of special interest, since in general the route is still as important as ever.

It seems to the writer that we of the twentieth century can consider the Mackenzie Corridor in somewhat the same light as the pioneers did the St. Lawrence. There is not much in the way of settlement in the north-west region at present; perhaps the total, including Indians and Eskimo, is less than seven thousand settlers. But of one thing we may be sure, and that is that in the next century the population will increase largely, and that the chief centres of settlement and supply will be much where the pioneer folk built their dwellings.

One of the chief purposes of this study is to put on record in a somewhat uniform manner the main characteristics of all the famous posts along the Mackenzie River, and, in a later paper, along the Yukon River, and this for two reasons. Canadians of today will welcome a detailed account of the way of life of the pioneers in geographical language; while the writer hopes that this somewhat hasty survey will be a sort of jumping-off place for similar surveys made, say, every fifty years in the future.

In this section, consisting of five parts, we examine: (i) Malthus's views on “luxury”; (ii) his appraisal of the frequently expressed “export of work” argument; (iii) in what sense his doctrine was counter-revolutionary; (iv) his stand on measures to encourage marriage and natality; and (v) his position on optimum population.