Thorstein Veblen
"The Modern Point of View and the New Order"
"DIAL. A Fortnightly", (New York: The Dial Publishing Company, Inc.)
Vol. LXVI (Dec., 28, 1918, to June, 28, 1919)
VIII. THE VESTED INTERESTS AND THE COMMON MAN
January 25, 1919, pp. 75-82
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[75]
The Modern Point of View and the New Order

VIII. THE VESTED INTERESTS AND THE COMMON MAN

IN THE EIGHTEENTH century certain principles of enlightened common sense were 
thrown into formal shape and adopted by the civilized peoples of that time to 
govern the system of law and order, use and wont, under which they chose to 
live. So far as concerns economic relations the principles which so became 
incorporated into the system of civilized law and custom at that time were 
the principles of equal opportunity, self-determination, and self-help. Chief 
among the specific rights by which this civilized scheme of equal opportunity 
and self-help were to be safeguarded were the rights of free contract and 
security of property. These make up the substantial core of that system of 
principles which is called the modern point of view, in so far as concerns 
trade, industry, investment, credit obligations, and whatever else may 
properly be spoken of as economic institutions. And these still stand over 
today as paramount among the inalienable rights of all free citizens in all 
free countries; they are the groundwork of the economic system as it runs 
today, and this existing system can undergo no material change of character 
so long as these paramount rights of civilized men continue to be 
inalienable. Any move to set these rights aside would be subversive of the 
modern economic order; whereas no revision or alteration of established 
rights and usages will amount to a revolutionary movement so long as it does 
not disallow these paramount economic rights.

When the constituent principles of the modern point of view were accepted and 
the modern scheme of civilized life was therewith endorsed by the civilized 
peoples, in the eighteenth century, these rights of self-direction and self-
help were counted on as the particular and sufficient safeguard of equity and 
efficiency in any civilized country. They were counted on to establish 
equality among men in all their economic relations and to maintain the 
industrial system at the highest practicable degree of productive efficiency. 
They were counted on to give enduring effect to the rule of Live and Let 
Live. And such is still the value ascribed to these rights in the esteem of 
modern men. The maintenance of law and order still means primarily and 
chiefly the maintenance of these rights of ownership and pecuniary 
obligation.

But things have changed since that time in such a way that the rule of Live 
and Let Live is no longer sufficiently safeguarded by maintaining these 
rights in the shape given them in the eighteenth century or at least there 
are large sections of the people in these civilized countries who are 
beginning to think so, which is just as good for practical purposes. Things 
have changed in such a way, since that time, that the ownership of property 
in large holdings now controls the nation's industry, and therefore controls 
the conditions of life for those who are or wish to be engaged in industry at 
the same time that the same ownership of large wealth controls the markets 
and thereby controls the conditions of life for those who have to resort to 
the markets to sell or buy. In other words, it has come to pass with the 
change of circumstances that the [76] rule of Live and Let Live how waits on 
the discretion of the owners of large wealth. In fact, those thoughtful men 
in the eighteenth century who made so much of these constituent principles of 
the modern point of view did not contemplate anything like the system of 
large wealth, large-scale industry, and large-scale commerce and credit which 
prevails today. They did not foresee the new order in industry and business, 
and the system of rights and obligations which they installed, therefore, 
made no provision for the new order of things that has come on since their 
time.

The new order has brought the machine industry, corporation finance, big 
business, and the world market. Under this new order in business and 
industry, business controls industry. Invested wealth in large holdings 
controls the country's industrial system, directly by ownership of the plant, 
as in the mechanical industries, or indirectly through the market, as in 
farming. So that the population of these civilized countries now falls into 
two main classes: those who own wealth invested in large holdings and who 
thereby control the conditions of life for the rest; and those who do not own 
wealth in sufficiently large holdings and whose conditions of life are 
therefore controlled by these others. It is a division, not between those who 
have something and those who have nothing as many socialists would be 
inclined to describe it but between those who own wealth enough to make it 
count, and those who do not.

And all the while the scale on which the control of industry and the market 
is exercised goes on increasing; from which it follows that what was large 
enough for assured independence yesterday is no longer large enough for 
tomorrow. Seen from another direction, it is at the same time a division 
between those who live on free income and those who live by work a division 
between the kept classes and the underlying community from which their keep 
is drawn. It is sometimes spoken of in this bearing particularly by certain 
socialists as a division between those who do no useful work and those who 
do; but this would be a hasty generalization, since riot a few of those 
persons who have no assured free income also do no work that is of material 
use, as, for example, menial servants. But the gravest significance of this 
cleavage that so runs through the population of the advanced industrial 
countries lies in the fact that it is a division between the vested interests 
and the common man. It is a division between those who control the conditions 
of work and the rate and volume of output and to whom the net output of 
industry goes as free income, on the one hand, and those who have the work to 
do and to whom a livelihood is allowed by those in control, on the other 
hand. In point of numbers it is a very uneven division, of course.

A vested interest is a legitimate right to get something for nothing, usually 
a prescriptive right to an income which is secured by controlling the traffic 
at one point or another. The owners of such a prescriptive right are also 
spoken of as a vested interest. Such persons make up what are called the kept 
classes. But the kept classes also comprise many persons who are entitled to 
a free income on other grounds than their ownership and control of industry 
or the market, as, for example, landlords and other persons classed as 
"gentry," the clergy, the Crown where there is a Crown and its officials, 
civil and military. Contrasted with these classes who make up the vested 
interests, and who derive an income from the established order of ownership 
and privilege, is the common man. He is common in the respect that he is not 
vested with such a prescriptive right to get something for nothing. And he is 
called common because such is the common lot of men under the new order of 
business and industry; and such will continue (increasingly) to be the common 
lot so long as the enlightened principles of secure ownership and self-help 
handed down from the eighteenth century continue to rule human affairs under 
the new order of industry.

The kept classes, whose free income is secured to them by the legitimate 
rights of the vested interests, are less numerous than the common man less 
numerous by some ninety-five per cent or thereabouts and less serviceable to 
the community at large in perhaps the same proportion, so far as regards any 
conceivable use for any material purpose. In this sense they are uncommon. 
But it is not usual to speak of the kept classes as the uncommon classes, 
since they personally differ from the common run of mankind in no sensible 
respect. It is more usual to speak of them as "the better classes," because 
they are in better circumstances and are better able to do as they like. 
Their place in the economic scheme of the civilized world is to consume the 
net product of the country's industry over cost, and so prevent a glut of the 
market.

But this broad distinction between the kept classes and their vested 
interests on the one side and the common man on the other side is by no means 
hard and fast. Doubtful cases are frequent, and a shifting across the line 
occurs now and again, but the broad distinction is not doubtful for all that. 
The great distinguishing mark of the common man is that he is helpless within 
the rules of the game as it is played in the twentieth century under the [77] 
enlightened principles of the eighteenth century.

There are all degrees of this helplessness that characterizes the common lot. 
So much so that certain classes, professions, and occupations such as the 
clergy, the military, the courts, police, and legal profession are perhaps to 
be classed as belonging primarily with the vested interests, although they 
can scarcely be counted as vested interests in their own right, but rather as 
outlying and subsidiary vested interests whose security of tenure is 
conditioned on their serving the purposes of those principal and self-
directing vested interests whose tenure rests immediately on large holdings 
of invested wealth. The income which goes to these subsidiary or dependent 
vested interests is of the nature of free income, in so far that it is drawn 
from the yearly product of the underlying community; but in another sense it 
is scarcely to be counted as "free" income, in that its continuance depends 
on the good will of those controlling vested interests whose power rests on 
the ownership of large invested wealth. Still it will be found that these 
subsidiary or auxiliary vested interests uniformly range themselves with 
their superiors in the same class, rather than with the common man. By 
sentiment and habitual outlook they belong with the kept classes, in that 
they are stanch defenders of that established order of law and custom which 
secures the great vested interests in power and insures the free income of 
the kept classes. In any twofold division of the population these are 
therefore, on the whole, to be ranged on the side of the old order, the 
vested interests, and the kept classes, both in sentiment and as regards the 
circumstances which condition their life and comfort.

Beyond these, whose life interests are, after all, closely bound up with the 
kept classes, there are other vested interests of a more doubtful and 
perplexing kind; classes and occupations which would seem to belong with the 
common lot, but which range themselves at least provisionally with the vested 
interests and can scarcely be denied standing as such. Such, as an 
illustrative instance, is the A. F. of L. Not that the constituency of the A. 
F. of L. can be said to live on free income, and is therefore to be counted 
in with the kept classes the only reservation on that head would conceivably 
be the corps of officials in the A. F. of L., who dominate the policies of 
that organization and exercise a prescriptive right to dispose of its forces, 
at the same time that they habitually come in for an income drawn from the 
underlying organization. The rank and file assuredly are not of the kept 
classes, nor do they visibly come in for a free income. Yet they stand on the 
defensive in maintaining a vested interest in the prerogatives of their 
organization. They are apparently moved by a feeling that so long as the 
established arrangements are maintained they will come in for a little 
something over and above what would come to them if they were to make common 
cause with the undistinguished common lot. In other words, they have a vested 
interest in a narrow margin of preference over and above what goes to the 
common man. But this narrow margin of net gain over the common lot, this 
vested right to get a narrow margin of something for nothing, has hitherto 
been sufficient to shape their sentiments and outlook in such a way as, in 
effect, to keep them loyal to the large business interests with whom they 
negotiate for this narrow margin of preference. As is true of the vested 
interests in business, so in the case of the A. F. of L., the ordinary ways 
and means of enforcing their claim to a little something over and above is 
the use of a reasonable sabotage, in the way of restriction, retardation, and 
unemployment. Yet the constituency of the A. F. of L., taken man for man, is 
not readily to be distinguished from the common sort so far as regards their 
conditions of life. The spirit of vested interest which animates them may, in 
fact, be nothing more to the point than an aimless survival.

Farther along the same line, larger and even more perplexing, is the case of 
the American farmers, who also are in the habit of ranging themselves, on the 
whole, with the vested interests rather than with the common man. By 
sentiment and outlook the farmers are, commonly, steady votaries of that 
established order which enables the vested interests to do a "big business" 
at their expense. Such is the tradition which still binds the farmers, 
however unequivocally their material circumstances under the new order of 
business and industry might seem to drive the other way. In the ordinary case 
the American farmer is now as helpless to control his own conditions of life 
as the commonest of the common run. He is caught between the vested interests 
who buy cheap and the vested interests who sell dear, and it is for him to 
take or leave what is offered but ordinarily to take it, on pain of "getting 
left."

There is still afloat among the rural population a slow-dying tradition of 
the "Independent Farmer," who is reputed once upon a time to have lived his 
own life and done his own work as good him seemed, and who was content to let 
the world wag. But all that has gone by as completely as the other things 
that are told in tales which begin with "Once upon a time." It has gone by 
into the same waste of regrets with the like independence which the country-
town retailer is believed to have enjoyed once upon a time. But the country-
town retailer [78] stands stiffly on the vested rights of the trade and of 
the town; he is by sentiment and habitual outlook a business man who guides, 
or would like to guide, his enterprise by the principle of charging what the 
traffic will bear, of buying cheap and selling dear. He still manages to sell 
dear, but he does not commonly buy cheap, except what he buys of the farmer, 
for the massive vested interests in the background now decide for him, in the 
main, how much his traffic will bear. He is not placed so very differently 
from the farmer in this respect, except that, being a middleman, he can in 
some appreciable degree shift the burden to a third party. The third party in 
the case is the farmer; the massive vested interests who move in the 
background of the market do not lend themselves to that purpose.

Except for the increasing number of tenant farmers, the American farmers of 
the large agricultural sections still are owners who cultivate their own 
ground. They are owners of property, who might be said to have an investment 
in their own farms, and therefore fancy that they have a vested interest in 
the farm and its earning-capacity. They have carried over out of the past and 
its old order of things a delusion to the effect that they have something to 
lose. It is quite a natural and rather an engaging delusion, since, barring 
incumbrances, they are seized of a good and valid title at law, to a very 
tangible and useful form of property. And by due provision of law and custom 
they are quite free to use or abuse -their holdings in the land, to buy and 
sell it and its produce altogether at their own pleasure. It is small wonder 
if the farmers, with the genial traditions of the day before yesterday still 
running full and free in their sophisticated brains, are given to consider 
themselves typical holders of a legitimate vested interest of a very 
substantial kind. In all of which they count without their host; their host, 
under the new order of business, being those massive vested interests that 
move obscurely in the background of the market, and whose rule of life it is 
to buy cheap and sell dear. 

In the ordinary case the farmers of the great American farming regions are 
owners of the land and improvements, except for an increasing proportion of 
tenant farmers. But it is the farmer-own- that is commonly had in mind in 
speaking of the American farmers as a class. Barring incumbrances, these 
farmer-owners have a good and valid title to their land and improvements; but 
their title remains good only so long as the run of the market for what they 
need and what they have to sell does not take such a turn that the title will 
pass by process of liquidation into other hands, as may always happen. And 
the run of the market which conditions the farmer's work and livelihood has 
now come to depend on the highly impersonal maneuvers of those massive 
interests that move in the background and find a profit in buying cheap and 
selling dear. In point of law and custom there is, of course, nothing to 
hinder the American farmer from considering himself to be possessed of a 
vested interest in his farm and its working, if that pleases his fancy. The 
circumstances which decide what he may do with his farm and its equipment, 
however, are prescribed for him quite deliberately and quite narrowly by 
those other vested interests in the background that are massive enough to 
regulate the course of- things in business and industry at large. He is 
caught in the system, and he does not govern the set and motions of the 
system. So that the question of his effectual standing as a vested interest 
becomes a question of fact, not of preference and genial tradition.

A vested interest is a legitimate right to get something for nothing. The 
American farmer say, the ordinary farmer of the grain-growing Middle West can 
be said to be possessed of such a vested interest only if he habitually and 
securely gets something in the way of free income above cost, counting as 
cost the ordinary rate of wages for work done on the farm plus ordinary 
returns on the replacement value of the means of production which he employs. 
Now it is notorious that, except for quite exceptional cases, there are no 
intangible assets in farming; and intangible assets are the chief and 
ordinary indication of free income, that is to say, of getting something for 
nothing. Any concern that can claim no intangible assets, in the way of 
valuable good-will, monopoly rights, or outstanding corporation securities, 
has no claim to be rated as a vested interest. What constitutes a valid claim 
to standing as a vested interest is the assured customary ability to get 
something more in the way of income than a full equivalent for tangible 
performance in the way of productive work.

The returns which these farmers are in the habit of getting from their own 
work and from the work of their household and hired help do not ordinarily 
include anything that can be called free or unearned income unless one should 
go so far as to declare that income reckoned at ordinary rates on the 
tangible assets engaged in this industry is to be classed as unearned income, 
which is not the usual meaning of the expression. It may be that popular 
opinion on these matters will take such a turn some time that men will come 
to consider that income which is derived from the use of land and equipment 
is rightly to be counted as unearned income, because it does not correspond 
to any tangible performance in [79] the way of productive work on the part of 
the person to whom it goes. But for the present that is not the popular sense 
of the matter, and that is not the meaning of the words in popular usage. For 
the present, at least, reasonable returns on the replacement value of 
tangible assets are not considered to be unearned income. 

It is true the habits of thought engendered by the machine system in industry 
and by the mechanically standardized organization of daily life under this 
new order, as well as by the material sciences, are of such a character as 
would incline the common man to rate all men and things in terms of tangible 
performance rather than in terms of legal title and ancient usage. And it may 
well come to pass, in time, that men will consider any income unearned which 
exceeds a fair return for tangible performance in the way of productive work 
on the part of the person to whom the income goes. The mechanistic logic of 
the new order of industry drives in that direction, and it may well be that 
the frame of mind engendered by this training in matter-of-fact ways of 
thinking will presently so shape popular sentiment that all income from 
property, simply on the basis of ownership, will be disallowed, whether the 
property is tangible or intangible. All that is a speculative question 
running into the future. It is to be recognized and taken account of that the 
immutable principles of law and equity, in matters of ownership and income as 
well as in other connections, are products of habit, and that habits are 
always liable to change in response to altered circumstances, and the drift 
of circumstances is now apparently setting in that direction. But popular 
sentiment has not yet reached that degree of emancipation from those good old 
principles of self-help and secure ownership that go to make up the modern 
(eighteenth century) point of view in law and custom. The equity of income 
derived from the use of tangible property may presently become a moot 
question; but it is not so today, outside of certain classes in the 
population whom the law and the courts are endeavoring to discourage. It is 
the business of the law and the courts to discourage any change of insight or 
opinion.

It appears, therefore, that his conditions of life should throw the American 
farmer in with the common man who has substantially nothing to lose, beyond 
what the vested interests of business can always take over at their own 
discretion and in their own good time. In point of material fact he has 
ceased to be a self -directing agent ; and self-help has for him come 
substantially to be a make-believe ; although, of course, in point of legal 
formality he still continues to enjoy all the ancient rights and immunities 
of secure ownership and self-help. Yet it is no less patent a fact of current 
history that the American farmer continues, on the whole, to stand fast by 
those principles of self-help and free bargaining which enable the vested 
interests to play fast and loose with him and all his works. Such is the 
force of habit and tradition.

The reason, or at least the preconception, by force of which the American 
farmers have been led, in effect, to side with the vested interests rather 
than with the common man, comes of the fact that the farmers are not only 
farmers but also owners of speculative real estate. And it is as speculators 
in land values that they find themselves on the side of unearned income. As 
land-owners they aim and confidently hope to get something for nothing in the 
unearned increase of land values. But all the while they overlook the fact 
that the future increase of land values, on which they pin their hopes, is 
already discounted in the present price of the land except for exceptional 
and fortuitous cases. As is known to all persons who are at all informed on 
this topic, farmland holdings in the typical American farming regions are 
overcapitalized, in the sense that the current market value of these 
farmlands is considerably greater than the capitalized value of the income to 
be derived from their current use as farmlands. This excess value of the 
farmlands is a speculative value due to discounting the future increased 
value which these lands are expected to gain with the further growth of 
population and with increasing facilities for marketing the farm products of 
the locality. It is therefore as a land speculator holding his land for a 
rise, not as a husbandman cultivating the soil for a livelihood, that the 
prairie farmer, for example, comes in for an excess value and an 
overcapitalization of his holdings. All of which has much in common with the 
intangible assets of the vested interests, and all of which persuades the 
prairie farmer that he is of a class apart from the common man who has 
nothing to lose. But he can come in for this unearned gain only by the 
eventual sale of his holdings, not in their current use as a means of 
production in farming. As a business man doing a speculative business in 
farmlands the American ' farmer, in a small way, runs true to form and so is 
entitled to a modest place among that class of substantial citizens who get 
something for nothing by cornering the supply and "sitting tight." And all 
the while the massive interests that move obscurely in the background of the 
market are increasingly in a position, in their own good time, to disallow 
the farmer just so much of this stillborn gain as they may dispassionately 
consider to be convenient for [80] their own use. And the farmer-speculator 
of the prairies continues to stand fast by the principles of equity which 
entitle the vested interests to play fast and loose with him and all his 
works.

The facts of the case stand somewhat different as regards the American 
farmer's gains from his work as a husbandman, or from the use which he makes 
of his land and stock in farming. His returns from his work are notably 
scant. So much so that it is still an open question whether, taken one with 
another, the American farmer's assets in land and other equipment enable him, 
one year with another, to earn more than what would count as ordinary wages 
for the labor which these assets enable him to put into his product. But it 
is beyond question that the common run of those American farmers who "work 
their own land" get at the best a very modest return for the use of their 
land and stock so scant, indeed, that if usage admitted such an expression it 
would be fair to say that the farmer, considered as a going concern, should 
be credited with an appreciable item of "negative intangible assets," such as 
habitually to reduce the net average return on his total active assets 
appreciably below the ordinary rate of discount. His case, in other words, is 
the reverse of the typical business concern of the larger sort, which conies 
in for a net excess over ordinary rates of discount on its tangible assets, 
and which is thereby enabled to write into its accounts a certain amount of 
intangible assets, and so come into line as a vested interest. The farmer, 
too, is caught in the net of the new order; but his occupation does not 
belong to that new order of business enterprise in which earning-capacity 
habitually outruns the capitalized value of the underlying physical property.

Evidently the cleavage due to be brought on by the new order in business and 
industry, between the vested interests and the common man, has not yet fallen 
into clear lines, at least not in America. The common man does not know 
himself as such, at least not yet, and the sections of the population which 
go to make up the common lot as contrasted with the vested interests have not 
yet learned to make common cause. The American tradition stands in the way. 
This tradition says that the people of the republic are made up of ungraded 
masterless men who enjoy all the rights and immunities of self-direction, 
self-help, free bargaining, and equal opportunity, quite after the fashion 
that was sketched into the great constituent documents of the eighteenth 
century. Much doubt and some discontent is afoot. It is becoming increasingly 
evident that the facts of everyday life under the new order do not fall in 
with the inherited principles of law and custom; but the farmers, farm 
laborers, factory hands, mine workmen, lumber hands, and retail tradesmen 
have not come to anything like a realization of the new order of economic 
life which throws them in together on one side of a line of division, on the 
other side of which stand the vested interests and the kept classes. They 
have not yet come to realize that all of them together have nothing to lose 
except such things as the vested interests can quite legally and legitimately 
deprive them of, with full sanction of law and custom as it runs, so soon and 
so far as it shall suit the convenience of the vested interests to make such 
a move. These people of the variegated mass have no safeguard, in fact, 
against the control of their conditions of life exercised by those massive 
interests that move obscurely in the background of the market, except such 
considerations of expediency as may govern the maneuvers of those massive 
ones who so move obscurely in the background. That is to say, the conditions 
of life for the variegated mass are determined by what the traffic will bear, 
according to the calculations of self-help which guide the vested interests, 
all the while that the farmers, workmen, consumers, the common lot, are still 
animated with the fancy that they have themselves something to say in these 
premises.

It is otherwise with the vested interests, on the whole. They take a more 
perspicuous view of their own case and of the predicament of the common man, 
the party of the second part. Whereas the variegated mass that makes up the 
common lot have not hitherto deliberately taken sides together or defined 
their own attitude toward the established system of law and order and its 
continuance, and so are neither in the right nor in the wrong as regards this 
matter, the vested interests and the kept classes, on the other hand, have 
reached insight and definition of what they need, want, and are entitled to. 
They have deliberated and chosen their part in the division, partly by 
interest and partly by ingrained habitual bent, no doubt and they are always 
in the right. They owe their position and the blessings that come of it free 
income and social prerogative to the continued enforcement of eighteenth 
century principles of law and order under conditions created by the twentieth 
century state of the industrial arts. Therefore it is incumbent on them, in 
point of expediency, to stand strongly for the established order of 
inalienable eighteenth century rights; and they are at the same time in the 
right, in point of law and morals, in so doing, since what is right in law 
and morals is [81] always a question of settled habit, and settled habit is 
always a legacy out of the past. To take their own part, therefore, the 
vested interests and the kept classes have nothing more perplexing to do than 
simply to follow the leadings of their settled code in all questions of law 
and order and thereby to fall neatly in with the leading of their own 
pecuniary advantage, and always and on both counts to keep their poise as 
safe and sound citizens intelligently abiding by the good old principles of 
right and honest living which safeguard their vested rights.

The common man is not so fortunate. He cannot effectually take his own part 
in this difficult conjuncture of circumstances without getting on the wrong 
side of the established run of law and morals. Unless he is content to go on 
as the party of the second part in a traffic that is controlled by the 
massive interests on the footing of what they consider that the traffic will 
bear, he will find himself in the wrong and may even come in for the 
comfortless attention of the courts. Whereas if he makes his peace with the 
established run of law and custom, and so continues to be rated as a good man 
and true, he will find that his livelihood falls into a dubious and 
increasingly precarious case. It is not for nothing that he is a common man.

So caught in a quandary, it is small wonder if the common man is somewhat 
irresponsible and unsteady in his aims and conduct, so far as touches 
industrial affairs. A pious regard for the received code of right and honest 
living holds him to a submissive quietism, a make-believe of self-help and 
fair dealing, whereas the material and pecuniary circumstances that condition 
his livelihood under this new order drive him to fall back on the underlying 
rule of Live and Let Live, and to revise the established code of law and 
custom to such purpose that the underlying rule of life shall be brought into 
bearing in point of fact as well as in point of legal formality. And the 
training to which the hard matter-of-fact logic of the machine industry and 
the mechanical organization of life now subjects him, constantly bends him to 
a matter-of-fact outlook, to a rating of men and things in terms of tangible 
performance, and to an ever slighter respect for the traditional principles 
that have come down from the eighteenth century. The common man is constantly 
and increasingly exposed to the risk of becoming an undesirable citizen in 
the eyes of the votaries of law and order. In other words, vested rights to 
free income are no longer felt to be secure in case the common man should 
take over the direction of affairs. 

Such a vested right to free income, that is to say the legitimate right of 
the kept classes to their keep at the cost of the underlying community, does 
not fall in with the lines of that mechanistic outlook and mechanistic logic 
which is forever gaining ground as the new order of industry goes forward. 
Such free income, which measures neither the investor's personal contribution 
to the production of goods nor his necessary consumption while engaged in 
industry, does not fit in with that mechanistic reckoning that runs in terms 
of tangible performance, and that grows ever increasingly habitual and 
convincing with every further habituation to the new order of things in the 
industrial world. Vested perquisites have no place in the new scheme of 
things; hence the new scheme is a menace. It is true, the well stabilized 
principles of the eighteenth century still continue to rate the investor as a 
producer of goods; but it is equally true that such a rating is palpable 
nonsense according to the mechanistic calculus of the new order brought into 
bearing by the mechanical industry and material science. This may all be an 
untoward and distasteful turn of circumstances, but there is no gain of 
tranquility to be got from ignoring it.

So it comes about that, increasingly, throughout broad classes in these 
industrial countries there is coming to be visible a lack of respect and 
affection for the vested interests, whether of business or of privilege; and 
it rises to the pitch of distrust and plain disallowance among those on whom 
the preconceptions of the eighteenth century sit more lightly and loosely. It 
still is all vague and shifty so much so that the guardians of law and order 
are still persuaded that they "have the situation in hand." But the popular 
feeling of incongruity and uselessness in the current run of law and custom 
under the rule of these timeworn preconceptions is visibly gaining ground and 
gathering consistency, even in so well ordered a republic as America. A 
cleavage of sentiment is beginning to run between the vested interests and 
the variegated mass of the common lot; and increasingly the common man is 
growing apathetic, or even impervious, to appeals grounded on these timeworn 
preconceptions of equity and good usage.

The fact of such a cleavage, as well as the existence of any ground for it, 
is painstakingly denied by the spokesmen of the vested interests; and in 
support of that comfortable delusion they will cite the exemplary fashion in 
which certain monopolistic labor organizations "stand pat." It is true, such 
a quasi-vested interest as the A. F. of L., which unbidden assumes to speak 
for the common man, can doubtless be counted on to "stand pat" on that system 
of imponderables in which its vested perquisites reside. So also the kept 
classes, and their stewards among [82] the keepers of law and custom, are 
inflexibly content to let well enough alone. They can be counted on to see 
nothing more to the point than a stupidly subversive rapacity in that 
loosening of the bonds of convention that so makes light of the sacred rights 
of vested interest. Interested motives may count for something on both sides, 
but it is also true that the kept classes and the businesslike managers of 
the vested interests, whose place in the economy of nature it is to make 
money by conforming to the received law and custom, have not in the same 
degree undergone the shattering discipline of the New Order. They are, 
therefore, still to be found standing blamelessly on the stable principles of 
the Modern Point of View.

But a large fraction of the people in the industrial countries is visibly 
growing uneasy under these principles as they work out under existing 
circumstances. So, for example, it is evident that the common man within the 
United Kingdom, in so far as the Labor Party is his accredited spokesman, is 
increasingly restive under the state of "things as they are," and it is 
scarcely less evident that he finds his abiding grievance in the Vested 
Interests and that system of law and custom which cherishes them. And these 
men, as well as their like in other countries, are still in an unsettled 
state of advance to positions more definitely at variance with the received 
law and custom. In some instances, and indeed in more or less massive 
formation, this movement of dissent has already reached the limit of 
tolerance and has found itself sharply checked by the constituted keepers of 
law and custom.

It is perhaps not unwarranted to count the I. W. W. as such a vanguard of 
dissent, in spite of the slight consistency and the exuberance of its 
movements. After all, these and their like, here and in other countries, are 
an element of appreciable weight in the population. They are also 
increasingly numerous, in spite of well-conceived repressive measures, and 
they appear to grow increasingly sure. And it will not do to lose sight of 
the presumption that, while they may be gravely in the wrong, they are likely 
not to be far out of touch with the undistinguished mass of the common sort 
who still continue to live within the law. It should seem likely that the 
peculiar moral and intellectual bent which marks them as "undesirable 
citizens" will, all the while, be found to run closer to that of the common 
man than the corresponding bent of the law-abiding beneficiaries under the 
existing system.

Vaguely, perhaps, and with a picturesque irresponsibility, these and their 
like are talking and thinking at cross-purposes with the principles of free 
bargain and self-help. There is reason to believe that to their own thinking, 
when cast in the terms in which they conceive these things, their notions of 
reasonable human intercourse are not equally fantastic and inconclusive. So, 
there is the dread word, Syndicalism, which is quite properly unintelligible 
to the kept classes and the adepts of corporation finance, and which has no 
definable meaning within the constituent principles of the eighteenth 
century. But the notion of it seems to come easy, by mere lapse of habit, to 
these others in whom the discipline of the New Order has begun to displace 
the preconceptions of the eighteenth century.

Then there are, in this country, the agrarian syndicalists, in the shape of 
the Nonpartisan League large, loose, animated, and untidy, but sure of itself 
in its settled disallowance of the Vested Interests, and fast passing the 
limit of tolerance in its inattention to the timeworn principles of equity. 
How serious is the moral dereliction and the subversive stupidity of these 
agrarian syndicalists, in the eyes of those who still hold fast to the 
eighteenth century, may be gathered from the animation of the business 
community, the commercial clubs, the Rotarians, and the traveling salesmen, 
in any place where the League raises its untidy head. And as if advisedly to 
complete the case, these agrarians, as well as their running-mates in the 
industrial centers and along the open road, are found to be slack in respect 
of their national spirit. So, at least, it is said by those who are 
interested to know.

It is not that these and their like are ready with "a satisfactory 
constructive program," such as the people of the uplift require to be shown 
before they will believe that things are due to change. It is something of a 
simpler and cruder sort, such as history is full of, to the effect that 
whenever and so far as the timeworn rules no longer fit the new material 
circumstances they presently fail to carry conviction as they once did. Such 
wear and tear of institutions is unavoidable where circumstances change; and 
it is through the altered personal equation of those elements of the 
population which are most directly exposed to the changing circumstances that 
the wear and tear of institutions may be expected to take effect. To these 
untidy creatures of the New Order common honesty appears to mean vaguely 
something else, perhaps something more exacting, than what was "nominated in 
the bond" at the time when the free bargain and self-help were written into 
the moral constitution of Christendom by the handicraft industry and the 
petty trade. And why should it not?

THORSTEIN VEBLEN. 
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