An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation

by Thorstein Veblen

The ground of this easy credulity is not so much infirmity of intellect as it is an exuberance of sentiment, although it may reasonably be believed that its more pronounced manifestations—as, e.g., the high protective tariff—can be had only by force of a formidable cooperation of the two. The patriotic animus is an invidious sentiment of joint prestige; and it needs no argument or documentation to bear out the affirmation that its bias will lend a color of merit and expediency to any proposed measure that can, however speciously, promise an increase of national power or prestige. So that when the statesmen propose a policy of inhibition and mitigated isolation on the professed ground that such a policy will strengthen the nation economically by making it economically self-supporting, as well as ready for any warlike adventure, the patriotic citizen views the proposed measures through the rosy haze of national aspirations and lets the will to believe persuade him that whatever conduces to a formidable national battle-front will also contribute to the common good. At the same time all these national conspiracies in restraint of trade are claimed, with more or less reason, to inflict more or less harm on rival nationalities with whom economic relations are curtailed; and patriotism being an invidious sentiment, the patriotic citizen finds comfort in the promise of mischief to these others, and is all the more prone to find all kinds of merit in proposals that look to such an invidious outcome. In any community imbued with an alert patriotic spirit, the fact that any given circumstance, occurrence or transaction can be turned to account as a means of invidious distinction or invidious discrimination against humanity beyond the national pale, will always go far to procure acceptance of it as being also an article

of substantial profit to the community at large, even though the slightest unbiased scrutiny would find it of no ascertainable use in any other bearing than that of invidious mischief. And whatever will bear interpretation as an increment of the nation's power or prowess, in comparison with rival nationalities, will always be securely counted as an item of joint credit, and will be made to serve the collective conceit as an invidious distinction; and patriotic credulity will find it meritorious also in other respects.

So, e.g., it is past conception that such a patent imbecility as a protective tariff should enlist the support of any ordinarily intelligent community except by the help of some such chauvinistic sophistry. So also, the various royal establishments of Europe, e.g., afford an extreme but therefore all the more convincing illustration of the same logical fallacy. These establishments and personages are great and authentic repositories of national prestige, and they are therefore unreflectingly presumed by their several aggregations of subjects to be of some substantial use also in some other bearing; but it would be a highly diverting exhibition of credulity for any outsider to fall into that amazing misconception. But the like is manifestly true of commercial turnover and export trade among modern peoples; although on this head the infatuation is so ingrained and dogmatic that even a rank outsider is expected to accept the fallacy without reflection, on pain of being rated as unsafe or unsound. Such matters again, as the dimensions of the national territory, or the number of the population and the magnitude of the national resources, are still and have perhaps always been material for patriotic exultation, and are fatuously believed to have some great significance for the material for

tunes of the common man; although it should be plain on slight reflection that under modern conditions of ownership, these things, one and all, are of no consequence to the common man except as articles of prestige to stimulate his civic pride. The only conjuncture under which these and the like national holdings can come to have a meaning as joint or collective assets would arise in case of a warlike adventure carried to such extremities as would summarily cancel vested rights of ownership and turn them to warlike uses. While the rights of ownership hold, the common man, who does not own these things, draws no profit from their inclusion in the national domain; indeed, he is at some cost to guarantee their safe tenure by their rightful owners.

In so pursuing their quest of the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory, by use of the national resources and by sanction of the national spirit, the constituted authorities also assume the guardianship of sundry material interests that are presumed to touch the common good; such as security of person and property in dealings with aliens, whether at home or abroad; security of investment and trade, and vindication of their citizens before the law in foreign parts; and, chiefly and ubiquitously, furtherance and extension of the national trade into foreign parts, particularly of the export trade, on terms advantageous to the traders of the nation.

The last named of these advantages is the one on which stress is apt to fall in the argument of all those who advocate an unfolding of national power, as being a matter of vital material benefit to the common man. The other items indicated above, it is plain on the least reflection, are matters of slight if any material consequence to him. The common man—that is ninety-nine and a

fraction in one hundred of the nation's common men—has no dealings with aliens in foreign parts, as capitalist, trader, missionary or wayfaring man, and has no occasion for security of person or property under circumstances that raise any remotest question of the national prowess or the national prestige; nor does he seek or aspire to trade to foreign parts on any terms, equitable or otherwise, or to invest capital among aliens under foreign rule, or to exploit concessions or take orders, for acceptance or delivery; nor, indeed, does he at all commonly come into even that degree of contact with abroad that is implied in the purchase of foreign securities. Virtually the sole occasion on which he comes in touch with the world beyond the frontier is when, and if, he goes away from home as an emigrant, and so ceases to enjoy the tutelage of the nation's constituted authorities. But the common man, in point of fact, is a home-keeping body, who touches foreign parts and aliens outside the national frontiers only at the second or third remove, if at all, in the occasional purchase of foreign products, or in the sale of goods that may find their way abroad after he has lost sight of them. The exception to this general rule would be found in the case of those under-sized nations that are too small to contain the traffic in which their commonplace population are engaged, and that have neither national prowess nor national prestige to fall back on in a conceivable case of need,—and whose citizens, individually, appear to be as fortunately placed in their workday foreign relations, without a background of prowess and prestige, as the citizens of the great powers who are most abundantly provided in these respects.

With wholly negligible exceptions, these matters touch the needs or the sensibilities of the common man only

through the channel of the national honour, which may be injured in the hardships suffered by his compatriots in foreign parts, or which may, again, be repaired or enhanced by the meritorious achievements of the same compatriots; of whose existence he will commonly have no other or more substantial evidence, and in whose traffic he has no share other than this vicarious suffering of vague and remote indignity or vainglory by force of the wholly fortuitous circumstance that they are (inscrutably) his compatriots. These immaterial goods of vicarious prestige are, of course, not to be undervalued, nor is the fact to be overlooked or minimised that they enter into the sum total of the common citizen's "psychic income," for whatever they may foot up to; but evidently their consideration takes us back to the immaterial category of prestige value, from which the argument just now was hopefully departing with a view to consideration of the common man's material interest in that national enterprise about which patriotic aspirations turn.