The brief period since 1935 has produced in the attitude of the Canadian Government and people towards national armaments and defence policy a change so sudden and striking as to merit the name of revolution. Observers who in the quite recent past had remarked the obstinate refusal of Ministry, Parliament, and public to pay the slightest attention to the apparatus of defence, have been astonished during the past three years by the energy with which the present Government (headed by a statesman who in three previous terms in office had shown no special interest in this phase of the national life) has attacked the problems of military policy, and by the vigour with which the Canadian electorate has fallen to discussing them.Students of the past, of course, are aware that Canada is merely running true to form. Her history is marked by an alternation of long periods when the national defences are utterly neglected with short violent interludes, arising out of sudden foreign complications, when the country awakes to the inadequacy of those defences and tries to make up for earlier inactivity by measures taken in the teeth of the crisis. In the light of this record, it is not surprising that a desperately perilous international situation has now forced the Dominion into one more military stock-taking. Nevertheless, the episode is arresting; and its possible ultimate implications for all Canadians are of such necessary interest that it may be worth while to record here the things that have been done, and to assess, in however imperfect and conjectural a fashion, the ideas that lie behind the new departures and the policies which they are designed to serve.