CANADA: New Viceroy; General Election

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Unsolved Problem. Where Canadians stand in the Empire and their attitude toward King George & Queen Mary as symbolized in the Dominion by Lord & Lady Tweedsmuir may be shrewdly guessed from a major pronouncement during the campaign by Premier Bennett. Though pro-English, a personal friend of the King, and with the warmest feelings for the Mother Country and her aristocracy, Mr. Bennett on the stump felt obliged to say to Canadians: "The Motherland is still vigorous and powerful, but it is no longer the directive machine of our national life. . . . Relationship between Canada and Great Britain still constitutes an unsolved problem."

Toward solving this problem the Governor-General will contribute with his canny words, while Canadians grapple with the real problems of unemployment, loss of markets, higher taxes, the dole, and whether Canada's two great duplicating railway systems, one State-owned and the other private, are to be merged and if so, whether under the state or private capital. None of these issues definitely crystallized in last week's general election, a depressing orgy of muckraking, boos, catcalls, rubber razzberries, fist fights, suits for libel and bombastic broadcasts.

Even before ballots were counted it was evident that to a large extent they could provide no clean-cut solution, so vigorously is Canada in ferment. Assuming, as most Canadians did before the count, a substantial victory for Mr. King & Liberals, they likewise assumed that he or any other Canadian who could conceivably become Premier now in coalition must steer a tortuous middle course: on one side are established bourgeois elements who still cast most of the ballots, and on the other the restive toilers who do not know what they want but are broadly out to soak the rich, raise the dole, nationalize railways and public utilities and probably amend the British North America Act, since this is apparently a brittle bulwark against change.

As returns came in Reform Conservative Stevens was seen to have split and disorganized his party's vote, turning the expected defeat of Premier Bennett & friends into a massacre which left the Conservatives this week with the smallest representation they have had in the history of the Dominion.

The Reformists, getting nowhere themselves, seemed likely to elect only Mr. Stevens. Hour by hour Mr. King & Liberals forged ahead on the crest of Canada's "against-the-Government'' reaction to Depression, until ultimately they found themselves topping the Liberal landslide which gives Mr. King the largest majority his party has ever had, makes him Premier-presumptive, to be installed in a few weeks.

The count virtually compiled: Liberals, 174; Conservatives, 40; Social Credit, 18; all others, a bare dozen.

The Significance: Slight, except that it shows Canadians have not gone radical. The Liberals can be compared to pre-Roosevelt Democrats in the U. S., but just as President Roosevelt turned his party upside down once he gained the White House, so, as Premier, Mr. King must make sweeping leftward motions. His first reaction was to promise this week to set up a national commission to grapple with unemployment, spread public works. Cried he:

''We have been attacked on all sides, and have won on all fronts. The people of Canada shall not be betrayed."