Thorstein Veblen
"Peace"
"DIAL. A Fortnightly", (New York: The Dial Publishing Company, Inc.)
Vol. LXVI (Dec., 28, 1918, to June, 28, 1919)
May 17, 1919, pp. 485-487
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[485]
Peace

INTEMPERATE CRITICISM has diligently sought to find fault with the covenant 
which has been devised and underwritten by the deputies of the great powers. 
The criticism has been animated and voluble, but it has been singularly 
futile on the whole. At the same time the spokesmen of this covenant show a 
singular lack of assurance; they speak in a tone of doubtful hope rather than 
enthusiastic conviction. And the statesmen who set up this covenant do so 
with such an engaging air of modesty and furtive apprehension as should 
engender a spirit of good will and fellowship in the presentation of a 
doubtfully hopeful enterprise, rather than obstructive tactics and 
intemperate criticism. They are saying, in effect: We have done the best we 
could under the circumstances. It is a great pity that we have been able to 
do no better. Let us hope for the best, and God help us all!

The best must always be good enough, and the Covenant is the best that the 
political wisdom of the three continents has been able to find in a five 
months' search for ways and means of avoiding war. But this best will always 
have the defects of its qualities. And such defects as still attach to the 
Covenant will best be understood, and may therefore best be condoned and 
allowed for, when seen in the light of its qualities. Now, as for its 
qualities, the Covenant is a political document, an instrument of real-
politik, created in the image of nineteenth century imperialism. It has been 
set up by political statesmen, on political grounds, for political ends, and 
with political apparatus to be used with political effect. It brings to a 
focus the best and highest traditions of commercialized nationalism, but also 
it brings nothing else. The outcome is a political covenant which even its 
friends and advocates view with an acute sense of its inability, perhaps 
rather a sense of its total vacuity.

Its defect is not that the Covenant falls short, but rather that it is quite 
beside the point. The point is the avoidance of war, at all costs; the war 
arose unavoidably out of the political status quo; the Covenant reestablishes 
the status quo, with some additional political apparatus supplied from the 
same shop. True to the political tradition, the Covenant provides for 
enforcing the peace by recourse to arms and commercial hostilities, but it 
contemplates no measures for avoiding war by avoiding the status quo out of 
which the great war arose. The status quo was a status of commercialized 
nationalism. The traditions which bind them will not permit anything beyond 
these political ends, ways, and means of commercialized nationalism to come 
within the cognizance of the competence of these elder statesmen who have had 
this work to do. So there is no help for it.

But the Covenant is after all the best that was reasonably to be looked for. 
It embodies the best and highest traditions of nineteenth century 
statesmanship. That it does so, that it is conceived in the spirit of Mid-
Victorian liberalism rather than in the spirit of Mid-European imperialism, 
is to be set down to the account of America and America's President. But that 
it remains standing as a left-over on that outworn ground, instead of coming 
up abreast of the twentieth century is also to be credited to the same power. 
It is in an eminent sense America's Covenant, made and provided by the 
paramount advice and consent of America's President, And this paramount 
advice and consent has gone to the making of the Covenant in the simple faith 
that commercialized nationalism answereth all things. The unfortunate, and 
unfortunately decisive, circumstance of the case is, therefore, that the 
President's outlook and ideals are in this way grounded in the political 
traditions of Mid-Victorian liberalism, and that his advisers have been 
animated with political traditions of a still narrower and more antiquated 
make. Hence the difficulties which arise out of a new industrial situation 
and a consequent new bias of the popular temper are sought to be adjusted by 
readjusting the political status quo ante.

Now, it should be plain to anyone on slight reflection that this covenant has 
been forced upon the politicians by the present state of the industrial 
system. The great war has run its course within the confines of this 
industrial system, and it has become evident that no nation is competent 
henceforth [486] single-handed to take care of its own case within this 
system, in which all the civilized peoples are bound up together. And it 
should be similarly plain, on similarly slight reflection, that no 
readjustment of working arrangements among the peoples concerned can hope to 
touch the core of the difficulties unless its scope is the same as that of 
the industrial system and unless it is carried out with a single-handed 
regard to the industrial requirements of the case, and coupled with a 
thoroughgoing disallowance of those political and nationalist precedents and 
ambitions' that hinder the free working of this industrial system.

The interval since Mid- Victorian time has been a period of unexampled change 
in the industrial arts and in the working arrangements necessary to 
industrial production. The productive industry of all the civilized peoples 
has been drawn together by the continued advance of the industrial arts into 
a single comprehensive, close-knit system, a network of mechanically balanced 
give and take, such that no nation and no community can now carry on its own 
industrial affairs in severally or at cross-purposes with the rest except at 
the cost of a disproportionate derangement and hardship to itself and to all 
the rest. All this is simple and obvious to those who are at all familiar 
with the technical requirements of production. To all such it is well known 
that for the purposes of productive industry, and therefore for the purposes 
of popular welfare and content, national divisions are nothing better than 
haphazard divisions of an indivisible whole, arbitrary and obstructive. And 
because of this state of things, any regulation or diversion of trade or 
industry within any one of these national units is of graver consequence to 
all the others than to itself. Yet the Covenant contemplates no abatement of 
that obstructive nationalist intrigue that makes the practical .substance of 
the "self-determination of nations."

At the same time, that which chiefly hampers the everyday work of industrial 
production and chiefly tries the popular temper under this new order of 
things is the increasingly obstructive and increasingly irresponsible control 
of production by the vested interests of commerce and finance, seeking each 
their own profit at the cost of the underlying population. Yet the Covenant 
contemplates no abatement of these vested interests that are fast approaching 
the limit of popular tolerance; for the Covenant is a political instrument, 
made and provided for the rehabilitation of Mid-Victorian political intrigue 
and for the upkeep of the vested interests of commerce and finance. The cry 
of the common man has been: What shall we do to be saved from war abroad and 
dissension at home? And the answer given in the Covenant is the good old 
answer of the elder statesmen of the Old Order provision of armed force 
sufficient to curb any uneasy drift of sentiment among the underlying 
populace, with the due advice and consent of the dictatorship established by 
the elder statesmen.

Now, the great war was precipitated by the malign growth of just such a 
commercialized nationalism within this industrial system, and was fought to a 
successful issue as a struggle of industrial forces and with the purpose of 
establishing an enduring peace of industrial prosperity and content; at least 
so they say. It should accordingly have seemed reasonable to entrust the 
settlement to those men who know something about the working and requirements 
of this industrial system on which the welfare of mankind finally turns. To 
any man whose perspective is not confined within the Mid-Victorian political 
traditions, it would seem that the first move toward an enduring peace would 
be abatement of the vested interests and national pretensions wherever they 
touch the conduct of industry; and the men to do this work should logically 
be those who know the needs of the industrial system and are not biased by 
commercial incentives. An enduring settlement should be entrusted to 
reasonably unbiased production engineers, rather than to the awestruck 
political lieutenants of the vested interests. These men, technical 
specialists, over-workmen, skilled foremen of the system, are expert in the 
ways and means of industry and know something of the material conditions of 
life that surround the common man, at the same time that they are familiar 
with the available resources and the uses to which they are to be turned. Of 
necessity in war and peace, it is for these workmen of the top line to take 
care of the industrial system and its working, so far as the obstructive 
tactics of the vested interests and the commercial statesmen will permit; for 
without their constant supervision and correction this highly technical 
system of production will not work at all. Logically it should be for these 
and their like to frame such a settlement as will bind the civilized peoples 
together on an amicable footing as a going concern, engaged on a joint 
industrial enterprise. However, it is not worth while to speculate on what 
they and their like might propose, since neither they nor their counsels have 
had any part in the Covenant. The Covenant is a covenant of commercialized 
nationalism, without afterthought.

To return to the facts: The great war was fought out and peace was brought 
within sight by teamwork of the soldiers and workmen and the political 
personnel. The cost, the work, and hardship fell on [487] the soldiers and 
workmen, and it is also chiefly their fortune that is now in the balance. The 
political personnel have lost nothing, risked nothing, and have nothing at 
stake on the chance of further war or peace. But in these deliberations on 
peace the political personnel alone have had a voice. Neither those who have 
done the necessary righting at the front nor those who have done the 
necessary work at home have had any part in it all. The conference has been a 
conclave made up of the spokesmen of commercialized nationalism, in effect a 
conclave of the political lieutenants of the political lieutenants of the 
vested interests. In short, there have been no Soldiers' and Workmen's 
Deputies included in this Soviet of the Elder Statesmen which has conferred 
the dictatorship on the political deputies of the vested interests. By and 
large, neither the wishes nor the welfare of the soldiers, the workmen, or 
the industrial system as a going concern, have visibly been consulted in the 
drafting of this Covenant. However, to avoid all appearance of graceless 
over-statement, it should perhaps be noted in qualification that the American 
workmen may be alleged to have been represented at this court of elder 
statesmen, informally, unofficially, and irresponsibly, by the sexton beadle 
of the A. F. of L., but it will be admitted that this qualification makes no 
serious inroad on the broader statement above.

Neither the value nor the cost of this Covenant are fairly to be appreciated 
apart from its background and the purposes and interests which are moving in 
the background. As it now looms up against this murky background of covert 
agreements covertly arrived at during the past months, the" Covenant is 
beginning to look like a last desperate concert of crepuscular statesmanship 
for the preservation of the civilized world's kept classes and vested 
interests in the face of a menacing situation. Therefore, in case the 
Covenant should yet prove to be so lasting and serve this turn so well as 
materially to deflect the course of events, what is likely to be of material 
consequence to the fortunes of mankind is chiefly the outcome of this furtive 
traffic in other men's good between the deputies of the great powers, which 
underlies and conditions the stilted formalities of the instrument itself. 
Little is known, and perhaps less is intended to be known, of this furtive 
traffic in other men's goods. Hitherto the "High Contracting Parties" have 
been at pains to give out no "information which might be useful to the 
enemy."

What and how many covert agreements have been covertly arrived at during 
these four or five months of diplomatic twilight will not be known for some 
time yet. A decent cover still hides what may be hidden, which is presumably 
just as well. And yet, even if one had best not see him face to face, one may 
still infer something as to the nature of the beast from the shape of his 
hoof. A little something in that way is coming in sight now in the shameful 
transaction by which the politicians and vested interests of Japan are given 
a burglarious free hand in northern China; and it would be both graceless and 
idle to speculate on what may be the grand total of gruesome enormities which 
the Oriental statesmen will have undertaken to perpetrate or overlook, for 
the benefit of the vested interests identified with the European powers, in 
consideration of that carte blanche of indecency. So also is the arrangement 
between the great powers for the suppression of Soviet Russia, for the profit 
of the vested interests identified with these Powers and at the cost of the 
underlying population; the due parceling out of concessions and natural 
resources in foreign parts, incident to that convention of smuggled warfare, 
will doubtless have consumed a formidable total of time, ingenuity, and 
effrontery. But the Covenant being an instrument of commercialized 
nationalism, all these things have had to be seen to.

THORSTEIN VEBLEN.
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