The Plaunt Lectures for 1965 deal with the perennial problem of moral man in immoral society, the society in question being the international states-system. An examination of the working of that system discloses that the scope for wrong-doing by the makers of foreign policy has, since 1945, enlarged rather than contracted. Deceit, treachery, and cruelty are held to be the characteristic manifestations of modern statecraft, rather than exceptional or aberrational. An attempt is made to discover why this should be so. The traditional attitudes towards the discrepancy between private ethics and the ethics of statecraft is assessed, and found wanting; a new attitude is outlined, and recommended. Finally, the Lectures seeks fresh answers to Machiavelli's classic inquiry into the ways in which statesman should keep faith; the inquiry is broadened to include not statesmen only, but public servants - diplomatic and military - the public at large, and intellectuals (in whom a special responsibility is discerned). The range of applications of these lectures is immense: argued closely, and yet from a broad intellectual base, they pertain directly to all who exercise and influence public authority.

In Defence of Canada: Appeasement and Rearmament is a companion and sequel to Eayrs' In Defence of Canada: From the Great War to the Great Depression (Toronto 1964). Like Volume I, Volume II rejects as outmoded and misleading the traditional division of national security policy into two compartments, one called foreign policy, the other, defence policy. Like Volume I, Volume II is meant to demonstrate that the military and diplomatic components of national security policy are, and ought to be, indissolubly combined, in study and analysis, as well as in formulation and execution. The emphasis in Volume II is mainly on the diplomatic: the tempo and importance of Canadian diplomacy steadily increase during the period with which it is concerned. That period opens with the Italian war aggression against Ethiopia in 1935. It closes in the late summer and early fall of 1940, as the twilight war becomes a total war.

The emerging threat of a militarily powerful Soviet Union after the Second World War caused the United States to rearm and look to the defence of its northern approaches against a possible Soviet bomber attack. The Canadian government, although less apprehensive about thios military threat than the American, realized the necessity of accommodating its neighbour's urgent desire for security and ought to avoid a US-Canada bilateral pact by a multilateral defence treaty and organization linking the democracies of Western Europe and North America.

The fourth volume of James Earys' highly acclaimed history of Canadian defence and external affairs studies the government's role in forming the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; its attempts, partly successful, to give the alliance the functions and authority it considered suited to Canadian interests and those of the Western democracies; and the problems it tried to deal with as a member of the Alliance - problems mobilizing the deterrent, of sharing the burden, and of explanding membership to include Greece, Turkey, and Western Germany. These decision, made some thirty years ago, have shaped the course of Canadian foreign policy ever since, and continue to have ramifications for Canadian life today.