Thorstein Veblen
"On the Nature and Uses of Sabotage"
"DIAL. A Fortnightly", (New York: The Dial Publishing Company, Inc.)
Vol. LXVI (Dec., 28, 1918, to June, 28, 1919)
April 5, 1919, pp. 341-346.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[341]
On the Nature and Uses of Sabotage

"SABOTAGE" IS A DERIVATIVE of "Sabot," which is French for a wooden shoe. It 
means going slow, with a dragging, clumsy movement, such as that manner of 
footgear may be expected to bring on. So it has come to describe any maneuver 
of slowing-down, inefficiency, bungling, obstruction. In American usage the 
word is very often taken to mean forcible obstruction, destructive tactics, 
industrial frightfulness, incendiarism and high explosives, although that is 
plainly not its first meaning nor its common meaning. Nor is that its 
ordinary meaning as the word is used among those who have advocated a 
recourse to sabotage as a means of enforcing an argument about wages or the 
condition of work. The ordinary meaning of the word is better defined by an 
expression which has latterly come into use among the I. W. W., " 
conscientious withdrawal of efficiency" although that phrase does not cover 
all that is rightly to be included under this technical term.

The sinister meaning which is often attached to the word in American usage, 
as denoting violence and disorder, appears to be due to the fact that the 
American usage has been shaped chiefly by persons and newspapers who have 
aimed to discredit the use of sabotage by organized workmen, and who have 
therefore laid stress on its less amiable manifestations. This is 
unfortunate. It lessens the usefulness of the word by making it a means of 
denunciation rather than of understanding. No doubt violent obstruction has 
had its share in the strategy of sabotage as carried on by disaffected 
workmen, as well as in the similar tactics of rival business concerns. It 
comes into the case as one method of sabotage, though by no means the most 
usual or the most effective; but it is so spectacular and shocking a method 
that it has drawn undue attention to itself. Yet such deliberate violence is, 
no doubt, a relatively minor fact in the case, as compared with that 
deliberate malingering, confusion, and misdirection of work that makes up the 
bulk of what the expert practitioners would recognize as legitimate sabotage.

The word first came into use among the organized French workmen, the members 
of certain syndicats, to describe their tactics of passive resistance, and it 
has continued to be associated with the strategy of these French workmen, who 
are known as syndicalists, and with their like-minded running-mates in other 
countries. But the tactics of these syndicalists, and their use of sabotage, 
do not differ, except in detail, from the tactics of other workmen elsewhere, 
or from the similar tactics of friction, obstruction, and delay habitually 
employed, from time to time, by both employees and employers to enforce an 
argument about wages and prices. Therefore, in the course of a quarter-
century past, the word has quite unavoidably taken on a general meaning in 
common speech, and has been extended to cover all such peaceable or 
surreptitious maneuvers of delay, obstruction, friction, and defeat, whether 
employed by the workmen to enforce their claims, or by the employers to 
defeat their employees, or by competitive business concerns to get the better 
of their business rivals or to secure their own advantage.

Such maneuvers of restriction, delay, and hindrance have a large share in the 
ordinary conduct of business; but it is only lately that this ordinary line 
of business strategy has come to be recognized as being substantially of the 
same nature as the ordinary tactics of the syndicalists. So that it has not 
been usual until the last few years to speak of maneuvers of this kind as 
sabotage when they are employed by employers and other business concerns. But 
all this strategy of delay, restriction, hindrance, and defeat is manifestly 
of the same character, and should conveniently be called by the same name, 
whether it is carried on by business men or by workmen; so that it is no 
longer unusual now to find workmen speaking of "capitalistic sabotage" as 
freely as the employers and the newspapers speak of syndicalist sabotage. As 
the word is now used, and as it is properly used, it describes a certain 
system of industrial strategy or management, whether it is employed by one or 
another. What it describes is a resort to peaceable or surreptitious 
restriction, delay, withdrawal, or obstruction.

Sabotage commonly works within the law, although it may often be within the 
letter rather than the spirit of the law. It is used to secure some special 
advantage or preference, usually of a businesslike sort. It commonly has to 
do with something in the nature of a vested right, which one or another of 
the parties in the case aims to secure or defend, or to defeat or diminish ; 
some preferential right or special advantage in respect of income or 
privilege, something in the way of a vested interest. Workmen have resorted 
to such measures to secure improved conditions of work, or increased wages, 
or shorter hours, or to maintain their habitual standards, to all of which 
they have claimed to have some sort of a vested right. Any strike is of the 
nature of sabotage, of course. Indeed, a [342] strike is a typical species of 
sabotage. That strikes have not been spoken of as sabotage is due to the 
accidental fact that strikes were in use before this word came into use. So 
also, of course, a lockout is another typical species of sabotage. That the 
lockout is employed by the employers against the employees does not change 
the fact that it is a means of defending a vested right by delay, withdrawal, 
defeat, and obstruction of the work to be done. Lockouts have not usually 
been spoken of as sabotage, for the same reason that holds true in the case 
of strikes. All the while it has been recognized that strikes and lockouts 
are of identically the same character.

All this does not imply that there is anything discreditable or immoral about 
this habitual use of strikes and lockouts. They are part of the ordinary 
conduct of industry under the existing system, and necessarily so. So long as 
the system remains unchanged these measures are a necessary and legitimate 
part of it. By virtue of his ownership the owner-employer has a vested right 
to do as he will with his own property, to deal or not to deal with any 
person that offers, to withhold or withdraw any part or all of his industrial 
equipment and natural resources from active use for the time being, to run on 
half time or to shut down his plant and to lock out all those persons for 
whom he has no present use on his own premises. There is no question that the 
lockout is altogether a legitimate maneuver. It may even be meritorious, and 
it is frequently considered to be meritorious when its use helps to maintain 
sound conditions in business that is to say, profitable conditions, as 
frequently happens. Such is the view of the substantial citizens. So also is 
the strike legitimate, so long as it keeps within the law; and it may at 
times even be meritorious, at least in the eyes of the strikers. It is to be 
admitted quite broadly that both of these typical species of sabotage are 
altogether fair and honest in principle, although it does not therefore 
follow that every strike or every lockout is necessarily fair and honest in 
its working-out. That is in some degree a question of special circumstances.

Sabotage, accordingly, is not to be condemned out of hand, simply as such. 
There are many measures of policy and management both in private business and 
in public administration which are unmistakably of the nature of sabotage and 
which are not only considered to be excusable, but are deliberately 
sanctioned by statute and common law and by the public conscience. Many such 
measures are quite of the essence of the case under the established system of 
law and order, price and business, and are faithfully believed to be 
indispensable to the common good. It should not be difficult to show that the 
common welfare in any community which is organized on the price system cannot 
be maintained without a salutary use of sabotage that is to say, such 
habitual recourse to delay and obstruction of industry and such restriction 
of output as will maintain prices at a reasonably profitable level and so 
guard against business depression. Indeed, it is precisely considerations of 
this nature that are now engaging the best attention of officials and 
business men in their endeavors to tide over a threatening depression in 
American business and a consequent season of hardship for all those persons 
whose main dependence is free income from investments.

Without some salutary restraint in the way of sabotage on the productive use 
of the available industrial plant and workmen, it is altogether unlikely that 
prices could be maintained at a reasonably profitable figure for any 
appreciable time. A businesslike control of the rate and volume of output is 
indispensable for keeping up a profitable market, and a profitable market is 
the first and unremitting condition of prosperity in any community whose 
industry is owned and managed by business men. And the ways and means of this 
necessary control of the output of industry are always and necessarily 
something in the nature of sabotage something in the way of retardation, 
restriction, withdrawal, unemployment of plant and workmen whereby production 
is kept short of productive capacity. The mechanical industry of the new 
order is inordinately productive. So the rate and volume of output have to be 
regulated with a view to what the traffic will bear that is to say, what will 
yield the largest net return in terms of price to the business men in charge 
of the country's industrial system. Otherwise there will be "overproduction," 
business depression, and consequent hard times all round. Overproduction 
means production in excess of what the market will carry off at a 
sufficiently profitable price. So it appears that the continued prosperity of 
the country from day to day hangs on a "conscientious withdrawal of 
efficiency" by the business men who control the country's industrial output. 
They control it all for their own use, of course, and their own use means 
always a profitable price.

In any community that is organized on the price system, with investment and 
business enterprise, habitual unemployment of the available industrial plant 
and workmen, in whole or in part, appears to be the . indispensable condition 
without which tolerable conditions of life cannot be maintained. That is to 
say, in no such community can the industrial system be allowed to work at 
full [343] capacity for any appreciable interval of time, on pain of business 
stagnation and consequent privation for all classes and conditions of men. 
The requirements of profitable business will not tolerate it. So the rate and 
volume of output must be adjusted to the needs of the market, not to the 
working capacity of the available resources, equipment and man power, nor to 
the community's need of consumable goods. Therefore there must always be a 
certain variable margin of unemployment of plant and man power. Rate and 
volume of output can, of course, not be adjusted by exceeding the productive 
capacity of the industrial system. So it has to be regulated by keeping short 
of maximum production by more or less, as the condition of the market may 
require. It is always a question of more or less unemployment of plant and 
man power, and a shrewd moderation in the unemployment of these available 
resources, a " conscientious withdrawal of efficiency," therefore, is the 
beginning of wisdom in all sound workday business enterprise that has to do 
with industry.

All this is matter of course and notorious. But it is not a topic on which 
one prefers to dwell. Writers and speakers who dilate on the meritorious 
exploits of the nation's business men will not commonly allude to this 
voluminous running administration of sabotage, this conscientious withdrawal 
of efficiency, that goes into their ordinary day's work. One prefers to dwell 
on those exceptional, sporadic, and spectacular episodes in business where 
business men have now and again successfully gone out of the safe and sane 
highway of conservative business enterprise that is hedged about with a 
conscientious withdrawal of efficiency, and have endeavored to regulate the 
output by increasing the productive capacity of the industrial system at one 
point or another.

But after all, such habitual recourse to peaceable or surreptitious measures 
of restraint, delay, and obstruction in the ordinary businesslike management 
of industry is too widely known and too well approved to call for much 
exposition or illustration. Yet, as one capital illustration of the scope and 
force of such businesslike withdrawal of efficiency, it may be in place to 
recall that all the civilized nations are just now undergoing an experiment 
in businesslike sabotage on an unexampled scale and carried out with 
unexampled effrontery. All these nations that have come through the war, 
whether as belligerents or as neutrals, have come into a state of more or 
less pronounced distress, due to a scarcity of the common necessaries of 
life; and this distress falls, of course, chiefly on the common sort, who 
have at the same time borne the chief burden of the war which has brought 
them to this state of distress. The common man has won the war and lost his 
livelihood. This need not be said by way of praise or blame. As it stands it 
is, broadly, an objective statement of fact, which may need some slight 
qualification, such as broad statements of fact will commonly need. All these 
nations that have come through the war, and more particularly the common run 
of their populations, are very much in need of all sorts of supplies for 
daily use, both for immediate consumption and for productive use. So much so 
that the prevailing state of distress rises in many places to an altogether 
unwholesome pitch of privation, for want of the necessary food, clothing, and 
fuel. Yet in all these countries the staple industries are slowing down. 
There is an ever increasing withdrawal of efficiency. The industrial plant is 
increasingly running idle or half idle, running increasingly short of its 
productive capacity. Workmen are being laid off and an increasing number of 
those workmen who have been serving in the armies are going idle for want of 
work, at the same time that the troops which are no longer needed in the 
service are being demobilized as slowly as popular sentiment will tolerate, 
apparently for fear that the number of unemployed workmen in the country may 
presently increase to such proportions as to bring on a catastrophe. And all 
the while all these peoples are in great need of all sorts of goods and 
services which these idle plants and idle workmen are fit to produce. But for 
reasons of business expediency it is impossible to let these idle plants and 
idle workmen go to work that is to say for reasons of insufficient profit to 
the business men interested, or in other words, for reasons of insufficient 
income to the vested interests which control the staple industries and so 
regulate the output of product. The traffic will not bear so large a 
production of goods as the community needs for current consumption, because 
it is considered doubtful whether so large a supply could be sold at prices 
that would yield a" reasonable profit on the investment or rather on the 
capitalization; that is to say, it is considered doubtful whether an 
increased production, such as to employ more workmen and supply the goods 
needed by the community, would result in ( an increased net aggregate income 
for the vested interests which control these industries. A reasonable profit 
always means, in effect, the largest obtainable profit. All this is simple 
and obvious, and it should scarcely need explicit statement. It is for these 
business men to manage the country's industry, of course, and therefore to 
regulate the rate and volume of output; and also of course any regulation of 
the output by them will be made with a view to the [344] needs of business; 
that is to say, with a view to the largest obtainable net profit, not with a 
view to the physical needs of these peoples who have come through the war and 
have made the world safe for the business of the vested interests. Should the 
business men in charge, by any chance aberration, stray from this straight 
and narrow path of business integrity, and allow the community's needs unduly 
to influence their management of the community's industry, they would 
presently find themselves discredited and would probably face insolvency. 
Their only salvation is a conscientious withdrawal of efficiency. All this 
lies in the nature of the case. It is the working of the price system, whose 
creatures and agents these business men are. Their case is rather pathetic, 
as indeed they admit quite volubly. They are not in a position to manage with 
a free hand, the reason being that they have in the past, under the routine 
requirements of the price system as it takes effect in corporation finance, 
taken on so large an overhead burden of fixed charges that any appreciable 
decrease in the net earnings of the business will bring any well-managed 
concern of this class face to face with bankruptcy.

At the present conjuncture, brought on by the war and its termination, the 
case stands somewhat in this typical shape. In the recent past earnings have 
been large; these large earnings (free income) have been capitalized; their 
capitalized value has been added to the corporate capital and covered with 
securities bearing a fixed income-charge; this income-charge, representing 
free income, has thereby become a liability on the earnings of the 
corporation ; this liability cannot be met in case the concern's net 
aggregate earnings fall off in any degree; therefore prices must be kept up 
to such a figure as will bring the largest net aggregate return, and the only 
means of keeping up prices is a conscientious withdrawal of efficiency in 
these staple industries on which the community depends for a supply of the 
necessaries of life.

The business community has hopes of tiding things over by this means, but it 
is still a point in doubt whether the present unexampled large use of 
sabotage in the businesslike management of the staple industries will now 
suffice to bring the business community through this grave crisis without a 
disastrous shrinkage of its capitalization, and a consequent liquidation; but 
the point is not in doubt that the physical salvation of these peoples who 
have come through the war must in any case wait on the pecuniary salvation of 
these owners of corporate securities which represent free income. It is a 
sufficiently difficult passage. It appears that production must be curtailed 
in the staple industries, on pain of unprofitable prices. The case is not so 
desperate in those industries which have immediately to do with the 
production of superfluities; but even these, which depend chiefly on the 
custom of those kept classes to whom the free income goes, are not feeling 
altogether secure. For the good of business it is necessary to curtail 
production of the means of life, on pain of unprofitable prices, at the same 
time that the increasing need of all sorts of the necessaries of life must be 
met in some passable fashion, on pain of such popular disturbances as will 
always come of popular distress when it passes the limit of tolerance.

Those wise business men who are charged with administering the salutary 
modicum of sabotage at this grave juncture may conceivably be faced with a 
dubious choice between a distasteful curtailment of the free income that goes 
to the vested interests, on the one hand, and an unmanageable onset of 
popular discontent on the other hand. And in either alternative lies 
disaster. Present indications would seem to say that their choice will fall 
out according to ancient habit, that they will be likely to hold fast by an 
undiminished free income for the vested interests at the possible cost of any 
popular discontent that may be in prospect and then, with the help of the 
courts and the military arm, presently make reasonable terms with any popular 
discontent that may arise. In which event it should all occasion no surprise 
or resentment, inasmuch as it would be nothing unusual or irregular and would 
presumably be the most expeditious way of reaching a modus vivendi. During 
the past few weeks, too, quite an unusually large number of machine guns have 
been sold to industrial business concerns of the larger sort, here and there; 
at least so they say. Business enterprise being the palladium of the 
Republic, it is right to take any necessary measures for its safeguarding. 
Price is of the essence of the case, whereas livelihood is not.

The grave emergency that has arisen out of the war and its provisional 
conclusion is, after all, nothing exceptional except in magnitude and 
severity. In substance it is the same sort of thing that goes on continually 
but unobtrusively and as a matter of course in ordinary times of business as 
usual. It is only that the extremity of the case is calling attention to 
itself. At the same time it serves impressively to enforce the broad 
proposition that a conscientious withdrawal of efficiency is the beginning of 
wisdom in all established business enterprise that has to do with industrial 
production. But it has been found that this grave interest which the vested 
interests always have in a salutary retardation of industry at one point or 
another cannot [345] well be left altogether to the haphazard and ill-
coordinated efforts of individual business concerns, each taking care of its 
own particular line of sabotage within its own premises. The needed sabotage 
can best be administered on a comprehensive plan and by a central authority, 
since the country's industry is of the nature of a comprehensive interlocking 
system, whereas the business concerns which are called on to control the 
motions of this industrial system will necessarily work piece-meal, in 
severalty and at cross-purposes. In effect, their working at cross-purposes 
results in a sufficiently large aggregate retardation of industry, of course, 
but the resulting retardation is necessarily somewhat blindly apportioned and 
does not converge to a neat and perspicuous outcome. Even a reasonable amount 
of collusion among the interested business concerns will not by itself 
suffice to carry on that comprehensive moving equilibrium of sabotage that is 
required to preserve the business community from recurrent collapse or 
stagnation, or to bring the nation's traffic into line with the general needs 
of the vested interests.

Where the national government is charged with the general care of the 
country's business interests, as is invariably the case among the civilized 
nations, it follows from the nature of the case that the nation's lawgivers 
and administration will have some share in administering that necessary 
modicum of sabotage that must always go into the day's work of carrying on 
industry by business methods and for business purposes. The government is in 
a position to penalize excessive or unwholesome traffic. So, it is always 
considered necessary, or at least expedient, by all sound mercantilists to 
impose and maintain a certain balance or proportion among the several 
branches of industry and trade that go to make up the nation's industrial 
system. The purpose commonly urged for measures of this class is the fuller 
utilization of the nation's industrial resources in material, equipment, and 
man power; the invariable effect is a lowered efficiency and a wasteful use 
of these resources, together with an increase of international jealousy. But 
measures of that kind are thought to be expedient by the mercantilists for 
these purposes that is to say, by the statesmen of these civilized nations, 
for the purposes of the vested interests. The chief and nearly sole means of 
maintaining such a fabricated balance and proportion among the nation's 
industries is to obstruct the traffic at some critical point by prohibiting 
or penalizing any exuberant undesirables among these branches of industry. 
Disallowance,, in whole or in part, is the usual and standard method.

The great standing illustration of sabotage administered by the government is 
the protective tariff, of course. It protects certain special interests by 
obstructing competition from beyond the frontier. This is the main use of a 
national boundary. The effect of the tariff is to keep the supply of goods 
down and thereby keep the price up, and so to bring reasonably satisfactory 
dividends to those special interests which deal in the protected articles of 
trade, at the cost of the underlying community. A protective tariff is a 
typical conspiracy in restraint of trade. It brings a relatively small, 
though absolutely large, run of free income to the special interests which 
benefit by it, at a relatively, and absolutely, large cost to the underlying 
community, and so it gives rise to a body of vested rights and intangible 
assets belonging to these special interests.

Of a similar character, in so far that in effect they are in the nature of 
sabotage conscientious withdrawal of efficiency are all manner of excise and 
revenue-stamp regulations; although they are not always designed for that 
purpose. 'Such would be, for instance, the partial or complete prohibition of 
alcoholic beverages, the regulation of the trade in tobacco, opium, and other 
deleterious narcotics, drugs, poisons, and high explosives. Of the same 
nature, in effect if not in intention, are such regulations as the 
oleomargarine law; as also the unnecessarily costly and vexatious routine of 
inspection imposed on the production of industrial (denatured) alcohol, which 
has inured to the benefit of certain business concerns that are interested in 
other fuels for use in internal-combustion engines; so also the singularly 
vexatious 'and elaborately imbecile specifications that limit and discourage 
the use of the parcel post, for the benefit of the express companies and 
other carriers which have a vested interest in traffic of that kind.

It is worth noting in the same connection, although it comes in from the 
other side of the case, that ever since the express companies have been taken 
over by the federal administration there has visibly gone into effect a 
comprehensive system of vexation and delay in the detail conduct of their 
traffic, so contrived as to discredit federal control of this traffic and 
thereby provoke a popular sentiment in favor of its early return to private 
control. Much the same state of things has been in evidence in the railway 
traffic under similar conditions. Sabotage is serviceable as a deterrent, 
whether in furtherance of the administration work or in contravention of it. 
In what has just been said there is, of course, no intention to find fault 
with any of these uses of sabotage. It is not a question of morals and good 
intentions. It is always to be presumed as a matter [346] of course that the 
guiding spirit in all such governmental moves to regularize the, nation's 
affairs, whether by restraint or by incitement, is a wise solicitude for the 
nation's enduring gain and security. All that can be said here is that many 
of these wise measures of restraint and incitement are in the nature of 
sabotage, and that in effect they habitually, though not invariably, inure to 
the benefit of certain vested interests ordinarily vested interests which 
bulk large in the ownership and control of the nation's resources. That these 
measures are quite legitimate and presumably salutary, therefore, goes 
without saying. In effect they are measures for hindering traffic and 
industry at one point or another, which may often be a wise precaution.

During the period of the war administrative measures in the nature of 
sabotage have been greatly extended in scope and kind. Peculiar and 
imperative exigencies have had to be met, and the staple means of meeting 
many of these new and exceptional exigencies has quite reasonably been 
something in the way of avoidance, disallowance, penalization, hindrance, a 
conscientious withdrawal of efficiency from work that does not fall in with 
the purposes of the Administration. Very much as is true in private business 
when a situation of doubt and hazard presents itself, so also in the business 
of government at the present juncture of exacting demands and inconvenient 
limitations, the Administration has been driven to expedients of disallowance 
and obstruction with regard to some of the ordinary processes of life, as, 
for instance, in the non-essential industries. It has also appeared that the 
ordinary equipment and agencies for gathering and distributing news and other 
information have in the past developed a capacity far in excess of what can 
safely be permitted in time of war. The like is true for the ordinary 
facilities for public discussion of all sorts of public questions. The 
ordinary facilities, which may have seemed scant enough in time of peace and 
slack interest, had after all developed a capacity far beyond what the 
governmental traffic will bear in these uneasy times of war and negotiations, 
when men are very much on the alert to know what is going on. By a moderate 
use of the later improvements in the technology of transport and 
communication, the ordinary means of disseminating information and opinions 
have grown so efficient that the traffic can no longer be allowed to run at 
full capacity during a period of stress in the business of government. Even 
the mail service has proved insufferably efficient, and a selective 
withdrawal of efficiency has gone into effect. To speak after the analogy of 
private business, it has been found best to disallow such use of the mail 
facilities as does not inure to the benefit of the administration in the way 
of good will and vested rights of usufruct.

These peremptory measures of disallowance have attracted a wide and dubious 
attention; but they have doubtless been of a salutary nature and intention, 
in some way which is not to be understood by outsiders that is to say, by 
citizens of the Republic. An unguarded dissemination of information and 
opinions or an unduly frank canvassing of the relevant facts by these 
outsiders, will be a handicap on the Administration's work, and may even 
defeat the Administration's aims. At least so they say.

Something of much the same color has been observed elsewhere/and in other 
times, so that all this nervously alert resort to sabotage on undesirable 
information and opinions is nothing novel, nor is it peculiarly democratic. 
The elder statesmen of the great monarchies, east and west, have long ago 
seen and approved the like. But these elder statesmen of the dynastic regime 
have gone to their work of sabotage on information because of a palpable 
division of sentiment between their government and the underlying population, 
such as does not exist in the advanced democratic commonwealths. The case of 
Imperial Germany during the period of the war is believed to show such a 
division of sentiment between the government and the underlying population, 
and also to show how such a divided sentiment on the part of a distrustful 
and distrusted population had best be dealt with. The method approved by 
German dynastic experience is sabotage, of a somewhat free-swung character, 
censorship, embargo on communication, and also, it is confidently alleged, 
elaborate misinformation.

Such procedure on the part of the dynastic statesmen of the Empire is 
comprehensible even to a layman. But how it all stands with those advanced 
democratic nations, like America, where the government is the dispassionately 
faithful agent and spokesman of the body of citizens, and where there can 
consequently be no division of aims and sentiment between the body of 
officials and any underlying population all that is a more obscure and 
hazardous subject of speculation. Yet there has been censorship, somewhat 
rigorous, and there has been selective refusal of mail facilities, somewhat 
arbitrary, in these democratic commonwealths also, and not least in America, 
freely acknowledged to be the most naively democratic of them all. And all 
the while one would like to believe that it all has somehow served some 
useful end. It is all sufficiently perplexing. T.

THORSTEIN VEBLEN.
------------------------------------------------------------------------