TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F.—PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 539 
Section F.—ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS. 
PRESIDENT OF THE SecTION.—Professor 8. J. CHapman, M.A., M.Com. 
THURSDAY, AUGUST 26, 
The President delivered the following Address :— 
Arrer searching for some time for a topic for this address suitable to 
Winnipeg I finally made a choice which may not commend itself at first as 
a happy one. It is not a topic of immediate local interest, but at a distance 
of nearly 4,000 miles I was not in a position to discover the economic 
problems the treatment of which would immediately arrest the attention 
of the people of middle Canada at the present time, and had a wizard’s 
wand disclosed to me such problems I should not have been able to solve 
them on paper from the other side of the Atlantic. And yet my subject has 
a direct reference to Canadian affairs, though the extent of this reference is 
not apparent till we look ahead and view things in perspective. It occurred 
to me after a cursory examination of some recent examples of that remark- 
able modern crop of Utopias and anticipations which apparently are 
appealing to an extensive public. If only these ‘new worlds’ represented 
what existed somewhere among human beings with passions and infirmities 
like our own, ‘ How much more instructive they would be!’ one was naturally 
led to reflect. You will see now the train of suggestion fired in my mind. 
Clearly, if the gaze of humanity is repeatedly drawn to its future, a visitor 
from a land of advanced industrialism who had made that industrialism his 
study, in speaking, in a country as yet thinly populated and young in 
industrial experience, of some of the most urgent problems which indus- 
trialism brings with it, might expect a hearing at least as patient as that 
which a very minor prophet would win. Now among the most insistent 
root problems to be found in our great industrial city civilisations are those 
which group themselves around wages, conditions of work and living, and 
the hours of labour. From this group I have chosen the problem of the 
hours of labour as the one which has not, perhaps, received the same 
measure of practical consideration as the rest. Expressed in another way, 
our topic is the value of leisure, the bearing of industrial development 
upon it, and its effectiveness in shaping economic arrangements. The 
demands continually made for shorter hours and a normal day, the claim, 
now extensively supported among Western peoples, that the State should 
intervene, and the fact that some Governments have intervened, even to the 
length of regulating the hours of adult male labour, are additional grounds 
for trusting that this topic will be at present of more than academic 
interest, 
