His aunt Ann Cragg Farthing served as an Anglican missionary in the United States territory of Alaska, in the Interior.

For five years after his return to Canada from England, he was a lecturer in Political Science & Economics at McGill; he was considered one of the brilliant young thinkers recruited and nurtured by Stephen Leacock.

He spent the tumultuous decade of the 1930s and the Great Depression buried in deep thought, with a view to developing new economic theories.

He contended that Canada and the Commonwealth have the means to direct men to a better way, one proven over many centuries to be the "best" way to order human affairs.

And meantime to perform the duties of the moment in which past and future are fused.The essence of the critique is that arguments about Man's natural state derived from first principles à la thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or Karl Marx (as related to his concept of "species being") are bound to lead to erroneous conclusions; no person can "know" what man's natural state truly was.

To Farthing, the British Crown and Westminster model of Parliamentary government are the best guarantors of human freedom, security, and happiness because they do not claim to know the unknowable, and do not seek perfection.

That the unwritten British Constitution is capable of such change, reform, and at times retraction, seems to Farthing to make it the most sensible form of government.

It highlights, in a very Edmund Burkean way, the fact that the British system of government is truly a "contract between the living, the dead and those who are yet to be born."

To Farthing, that is its essential genius, and something that Canada should not pass up too lightly in trying to emulate the United States and other such ideological and inorganic systems of government.

What set Farthing's work apart from theirs is that he was addressing his defence of the British system from the perspective of outsider, in the sense that what he was defending was no longer de rigueur politically.