Thorstein Veblen
The Country Town
(The Freeman, July 11, 1923, pp. 417-420, and July 18, 1923, pp. 440-443).

Republished without change (only some punctuation changed) in Veblen's 'Absentee 
Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times' (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 
1923, chap. VII., sect. III. pp. 142-165).
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THE COUNTRY TOWN.
[417] The country town of the great American farming-region is the perfect 
flower of self-help and cupidity standardized on the American plan. Its name may 
be Spoon River or Gopher Prairie, or it may be Emporia [418] or Centralia or 
Columbia. The pattern is substantially the same, and is repeated several 
thousand times with a faithful perfection which argues that there is no help for 
it, that it is worked out by uniform circumstances over which there is no 
control, and that it wholly falls in with the spirit of things and answers to 
the enduring aspirations of the community. The country town is one of the great 
American institutions; perhaps the greatest, in the sense that it has had and 
continues to have a greater part than any other in shaping public sentiment and 
giving character to American culture.
The location of ally given town has commonly been determined by collusion 
between "interested parties" with a view to speculation in real estate, and it 
continues through its life-history (hitherto) to be managed as a real-estate 
"proposition." Its municipal affairs, its civic pride, its community interest, 
converge upon its real-estate values, which are invariably of a speculative 
character, and which all its loyal citizens are intent on "booming" and 
"boosting" - that is to say, lifting still farther off the level of actual 
ground-values as measured by the uses to which the ground is turned. Seldom do 
the current (speculative) values of the town's real estate exceed the use-value 
of it by less than 100 per cent; and never do they exceed the actual values by 
less than 200 per cent, as shown by the estimates of the tax-assessor, nor do 
the loyal citizens ever cease their endeavours to lift the speculative values to 
something still farther out of touch with the material facts. A country town 
which does not answer to these specifications is "a dead one," one that has 
failed to "make good," and need not be counted with, except as a warning to the 
unwary "boomer."(1*) Real estate is the one community-interest that binds the 
townsmen with a common bond; and it is highly significant - perhaps it is 
pathetic, perhaps admirable - that those inhabitants of the town who have no 
holdings of real estate and who never hope to have any, will commonly also do 
their little best to inflate the speculative values by adding the clamour of 
their unpaid chorus to the paid clamour of the professional publicity-agents, at 
the cost of so adding a little something to their own cost of living in the 
enhanced rentals and prices out of which the expenses of publicity are to be 
met.
Real estate is an enterprise in "futures," designed to get something for nothing 
from the unwary, of whom it is believed by experienced persons that "there is 
one born every minute." So farmers and townsmen together throughout the great 
farming-region are pilgrims of hope looking forward to the time when the 
community's advancing needs will enable them to realize on the inflated values 
of their real estate, or looking more immediately to the chance that one or 
another of those who are "born every minute" may be so ill-advised as to take 
them at their word and become their debtors in the amount which they say their 
real estate is worth. The purpose of country-town real estate, as of farm real 
estate in a less extreme degree, is to realize on it. This is the common bond of 
community-interest which binds and animates the business-community of the 
country town. In this enterprise there is concerted action and a spirit of 
solidarity, as well as a running business of mutual manoeuvring to get the 
better of one another. For eternal vigilance is the price of country-town real 
estate, being an enterprise in salesmanship.
Aside from this common interest in the town's inflated real estate, the townsmen 
are engaged in a vigilant rivalry, being competitors in the traffic carried on 
with the farm-population. The town is a retail trading-station, where farm-
produce is bought and farm-supplies are sold, and there are always more traders 
than are necessary to take care of this retail trade. So that they are each and 
several looking to increase their own share in this trade at the expense of 
their neighbours in the same line. There is always more or less active 
competition, often underhand. But this does not hinder collusion between the 
competitors with a view to maintain and augment their collective hold on the 
trade with their farm-population.
From an early point in the life-history of such a town, collusion habitually 
becomes the rule, and there is commonly a well recognized ethical code of 
collusion governing the style and limits of competitive manoeuvres which any 
reputable trader may allow himself, In effect, the competition among business-
concerns engaged in any given line of traffic is kept well in hand by a common 
understanding, and the traders as a body direct their collective efforts to 
getting what can be got out of the underlying farm-population. It is on this 
farm-trade also, and on the volume and increase of it, past and prospective, 
that the real-estate values of the town rest. As one consequence, the volume and 
profit of the farm-trade is commonly overstated, with a view to enhancing the 
town's real-estate values.
Quite as a matter of course, the business of the town arranges itself under such 
regulations and usages that it foots up to a competition, not between the 
business-concerns, but between town and country, between traders and customers. 
And quite as a matter of, course, too, the number of concerns doing business in 
any one town greatly exceeds what is necessary to carry on the traffic; with the 
result that while the total profits of the business in any given town are 
inordinately large for the work done, the profits of any given concern are 
likely to be modest enough. The more successful ones among them commonly do very 
well and come in for large returns on their outlay, but the average returns per 
concern or per man are quite modest, and the less successful ones are habitually 
doing business within speaking-distance of bankruptcy. The number of failures is 
large, but they are habitually replaced by others who still have something to 
lose. The conscientiously habitual overstatements of the real-estate interests 
continually draw new traders into the town; for the retail trade of the town 
also gets its quota of such persons as are born every minute, who then 
transiently become supernumerary retail traders. Many fortunes are made in the 
country towns, of-tell fortunes of very respectable proportions; but many 
smaller fortunes are also lost.

Neither the causes nor the effects of this state of things have been expounded 
by the economists, nor has it found a place in the many formulations of theory 
that have to do with the retail trade; presumably because it is all, under the 
circumstances, so altogether "natural" and unavoidable. Exposition of the 
obvious is a tedious employment, and a recital of commonplaces does not hold the 
interest of readers or audience. Yet, for completeness of the argument, it seems 
necessary here to go a little farther into the details and add something on the 
reasons for this arrangement. However obvious and natural it may be, it is after 
all serious enough to merit the attention of anyone who is interested in the 
economic situation as it stands, or in finding a way out of this situation; 
which is just now quite perplexing, as the futile endeavours of the statesmen 
will abundantly demonstrate.
However natural and legitimate it all undoubtedly may be, the arrangement as it 
runs to-day imposes on the country's farm-industry an annual overhead charge 
which runs into ten or twelve figures, and all to the benefit of no one. This 
overhead charge of billions, due to duplication of work, personnel, equipment, 
and traffic, in the country towns is, after all, simple and obvious waste. Which 
is perhaps to, be deprecated, although one may Well hesitate to find fault with 
it all, inasmuch as it is all a simple and obvious outcome of those democratic 
principles of self-help and cupidity on which the commonwealth is founded. These 
principles are fundamentally and eternally right and good - so long as popular 
sentiment runs to that effect - and they are to be accepted gratefully, with the 
defects of their qualities. The whole arrangement is doubtless all right and 
worth its cost; indeed it is avowed to be the chief care and most righteous 
solicitude of the constituted authorities to maintain and cherish it all.
To an understanding of the country town and its place in the economy of American 
farming, it should he noted that in the great farming-regions any given town has 
a virtual monopoly of the trade within the territory tributary to it. This 
monopoly is neither complete nor indisputable; it does not cover all lines of 
traffic equally, nor is outside competition completely excluded in any line. But 
the broad statement is quite sound, that within its domain any given country 
town in the farming-country has a virtual monopoly of trade in those main lines 
of business in which the townsmen are chiefly engaged. And the townsmen are 
vigilant in taking due precautions that this virtual monopoly shall not be 
broken in upon. It may be remarked by the way that this characterization applies 
to the country towns of the great farming-country, and only in a less degree to 
the towns of the industrial and outlying sections.
Under such a (virtual) monopoly, the charge collected on the traffic adjusts 
itself, quite as a matter of course, to what the traffic will bear. It has no 
other relation to the costs or the use-value of the service rendered. But what 
the traffic will bear is something to be determined by experience and is subject 
to continued readjustment and revision, with the effect of unremittingly keeping 
the charge close up to the practicable maximum. Indeed, there is reason to 
believe that the townsmen are habitually driven by a conscientious cupidity and 
a sense of equity to push the level of charges somewhat over the maximum; that 
is to say, over the rate which would yield them the largest net return, Since 
there are too many of them, they are so placed as habitually to feel that they 
come in for something short of their just deserts, and their endeavour to remedy 
this state of things is likely to lead to overcharging rather than the reverse.
What the traffic will bear in this retail trade is what the farm-population will 
put up with, without breaking away and finding their necessary supplies and 
disposing of their marketable products elsewhere, in some other town, through 
itinerant dealers, by recourse to brokers at a distance, through the mail-order 
concerns, and the like. The two dangerous outside channels of trade appear to be 
the rival country towns and the mail-order houses, and of these the mail-order 
houses are apparently the more real menace as well as the more dreaded. Indeed 
they are quite cordially detested by right-minded country-town dealers. The 
rival country towns are no really grave menace to the usurious charges of any 
community of country-town business man, since they are all and several in the 
same position and none of them fails to charge all corners all that the traffic 
will bear.
There is also another limiting condition to be considered in determining what 
the traffic will bear in this retail trade, though it is less, or at least less 
visibly, operative, namely: the point beyond which the charges can not 
enduringly be advanced without discouraging the farm-population unduly; that is 
to say, the point beyond which the livelihood of the farm-population will be cut 
into so severely by the overcharging of the retail trade that they begin to 
decide that they have nothing more to lose, and so give up and move out. ,This 
critical point appears not commonly to be reached in the ordinary retail trade - 
as, e.g., groceries, clothing, hardware - possibly because there still remains, 
practicable in an extremity, the recourse to outside dealers of one sort and 
another. In the business of country-town banking, however, and similar money-
lending by other persons than the banks, the critical point is not infrequently 
reached and passed. Here the local monopoly is fairly complete and rigorous, 
which brings on an insistent provocation to overreach.
Then, too, the banker deals in money-values, and money-values are for ever 
liable to fluctuate, at the same time that the fortunes of the banker's farm-
clients are subject to the vicissitudes of the seasons and of the markets; and 
competition drives both banker and client to base their habitual rates, not on a 
conservative anticipation of what is likely to happen, but on the lucky chance 
of what may come to pass barring accidents and the acts of God. And the banker 
is under the necessity - "inner necessity," as the Hegelians would say - of 
getting all he can and securing himself against all risk, at the cost of any 
whom it may concern, by such charges and stipulations as will ensure his net 
gain in any event.
It is the business of the country-town business-community, one with another, to 
charge what the traffic will bear; and the traffic will bear charges that are 
inordinately high as counted on the necessary cost or the use-value of the work 
to be done. It follows, under the common-sense logic of self-help, cupidity, and 
business-as-usual, that men eager to do business on a good margin will continue 
to drift in and cut into the traffic until the number of concerns among whom the 
gains are to be divided is so large that each one's share is no more than will 
cover costs and leave a "reasonable" margin of net gain. So that while the 
underlying farm-population continues to yield inordinately high charges on the 
traffic, the business-concerns engaged, one with another, come in for no more 
than what will induce them to go on; the reason being that in the retail trade 
as conducted on this plan of self-help and equal opportunity, the stocks, 
equipment and man-power employed will unavoidably exceed what is required for 
the work, by some 200 to 1000 per cent, those lines of the trade being the more 
densely overpopulated which enjoy the nearest approach to a local monopoly, as 
e. g., groceries, or banking.(2*)
It is perhaps not impertinent to call to mind that the retail trade throughout, 
always and everywhere, runs on very much the same plan of inordinately high 
[420] charges and consequently extravagant multiplication of stocks, equipment, 
work, personnel, publicity, credits, and costs, It runs to the same effect in 
city, town and country. And in city, town or country it is in all of these 
several respects the country's largest business-enterprise in the aggregate; and 
always something like three-fourths to nine-tenths of it is idle waste, to be 
cancelled out of the community's working-efficiency as lag, leak and friction. 
When the statesmen and the newspapers - and other publicity-agencies - speak for 
the security and the meritorious work of the country's business men, it is 
something of this sort they are talking about. The bulk of the country's 
business is the retail trade, and in an eminent sense the retail trade is 
business-as-usual.
The retail trade, and therefore in its degree the country town, have been the 
home ground of American culture and the actuating centre of public affairs and 
public sentiment throughout the nineteenth century, ever more securely and 
unequivocally as the century advanced and drew towards it close. In American 
parlance "The Public," so far as it can be defined, has meant those persons who 
are engaged in and about the business of the retail trade, together with such of 
the kept classes as draw their keep from this traffic. The road to success has 
run into and through the country town, or its retail-trade equivalent in the 
cities, and the habits of thought engendered by the preoccupations of the retail 
trade have shaped popular sentiment and popular morals and have dominated public 
policy in what was to be done and what was to be left undone, locally and at 
large, in political, civil, social, ecclesiastical, and educational concerns. 
The country's public men and official spokesmen have come up through and out of 
the country-town community, on passing the test of fitness according to retail-
trade standards, and have carried with them into official responsibility the 
habits of thought induced by these interests and these habits of life.
This is also what is meant by democracy in American parlance, and it was for 
this country-town pattern of democracy that the Defenders of American Faith once 
aspired to make the world safe. Meantime democracy, at least in America, has 
moved forward and upward to a higher business-level, where larger vested 
interests dominate and bulkier margins of net gain are in the hazard. It has 
come to be recognized that the country-town situation of the nineteenth century 
is now by way of being left behind; and so it is now recognized, or at least 
acted on, that the salvation of twentieth-century democracy is best to be worked 
out by making the world safe for Big Business, and then letting Big Business 
take care of the interests of the retail trade and the Country town, together 
with much else. But it should not be overlooked that in and through all this it 
is the soul of the country town that goes marching on.
Towards the close of the century, and increasingly since the turn of the 
century, the trading-community of the country towns has been losing its 
initiative as a maker of charges and has by degrees become tributary to the 
great vested interests that move in the background of the market. In a way the 
country towns have in an appreciable degree fallen into the position of toll-
gate keepers for the distribution of goods and collection of customs for the 
large absentee owners of the business. Grocers, hardware-dealers, meat-markets, 
druggists, shoe-shops, are more and more extensively falling into the position 
of local distributors for jobbing houses and manufacturers. They increasingly 
handle "package goods" bearing the brand of some (ostensible) maker, whose chief 
connexion with the goods is that of advertiser of the copyright brand which 
appears on the label. Prices, and margins, are made for the retailers, which 
they can take or leave. But leaving, in this connexion, will commonly mean 
leaving the business - which is not included in the premises. The bankers work 
by affiliation with and under surveillance of their correspondents in the sub-
centres of credit, who are similarly tied in under the credit-routine of the 
associated banking-houses in the great centres. And the clothiers duly sell 
garments under the brand of "Cost-Plus," or some such apocryphal token of merit.
All this reduction of the retailers to simpler terms has by no means lowered the 
overhead charges of the retail trade as they bear upon the underlying farm-
population; rather the reverse, Nor has it hitherto lessened the duplication of 
stocks, equipment, personnel and work, that goes into the retail trade; rather 
the reverse, indeed, whatever may yet happen in that connexion. Nor has it 
abated the ancient spirit of self-help and cupidity that has always animated the 
retail trade and the country town; rather the reverse ; inasmuch as their 
principals back in the jungle of Big Business cut into the initiative and the 
margins of the retailers with "package goods," brands, advertising, and agency-
contracts; which irritation the retailers and provokes them to retaliate and 
recoup where they see an opening; that is, at the cost of the underlying farm-
population. It is true, the added overcharge which so can effectually be brought 
to rest on the farm-population may well be a negligible quantity; there never 
was much slack to be taken upon that side.
[440] The best days of the retail trader and the country town are past, The 
retail trader is passing under the hand of Big Business, and so is ceasing to be 
a masterless man ready to follow the line of his own initiative and help to rule 
his corner of the land in collusion with his fellow-townsmen. Circumstances are 
prescribing for him. The decisive circumstances that hedge him about have been 
changing in such a way as to leave him no longer fit to do business on his own, 
even in collusion with his fellow-townsmen. The retail trade and the country 
town are an enterprise in salesmanship, of course, and salesmanship is a matter 
of buying cheap and selling dear; all of which is simple and obvious to any 
retailer, and holds true all around the circle from grocer to banker and back 
again. During the period while the country town has flourished and grown into 
the texture of the economic situation, the salesmanship which made the outcome 
was a matter of personal qualities, knack and skill that gave the dealer an 
advantage in meeting his customers man to man, largely a matter of tact, 
patience and effrontery; those qualities, in short, which have qualified the 
rustic horse-trader and have cast a glamour of adventurous enterprise over 
American country life. In this connexion it is worth recalling that the 
personnel engaged in the retail trade of the country towns has in the main been 
drawn by self-selection from the farm-population, prevailingly from the older 
settled sections where this traditional animus of the horse-trader is of older 
growth and more untroubled.
All this was well enough, at least during the period of what may be called the 
masterless country town, before Big Business began to come into its own in these 
premises. But this situation has been changing, becoming obsolete, slowly, by 
insensible degrees. The factors of change have been such as: increased 
facilities of transport and communication; increasing use of advertising, 
largely made possible by facilities of transport and communication; increased 
size and combination of the business-concerns engaged in the wholesale trade, as 
packers, jobbers, warehouse-concerns handling farm-products; increased resort to 
package-goods, brands, and trade-marks, advertised on a liberal plan which runs 
over the heads of the retailers; increased employment of chain-store methods and 
agencies; increased dependence of local bankers on the greater credit-
establishments of the financial centres. It will be seen, of course, that this 
new growth finally runs back to and rests upon changes of a material sort in the 
industrial arts, and more immediately on changes in the means of transport and 
communication.
In effect, salesmanship, too, has been shifting to the wholesale scale and plan, 
and the country-town retailer is not in a position to make use of the resulting 
wholesale methods of publicity and control. The conditioning circumstances have 
outgrown him. Should he make the shift to the wholesale plan of salesmanship lie 
will cease to be a country-town retailer and take on the character of a chain-
store concern, a line-yard lumber-syndicate, a mail-order house, a Chicago 
packer instead of a meat market, a Reserve Bank instead of a county-seat banker, 
and the like; all of which is not contained in the premises of the country-town 
retail trade.
The country town, of course, still has its uses, and its use so far as bears on 
the daily life of the underlying farm-population is much the same as ever; but 
for the retail trade and for those accessory persons and classes who draw their 
keep from its net gains, the country-town is no longer what it once was. It 
[441] has been falling into the position of a way station in the distributive 
system, instead of a local habitation where a man of initiative and principle 
might reasonably hope to come in for a "competence" - that is a capitalized free 
livelihood - and bear his share in the control of affairs without being 
accountable to any master-concern "higher up" in the hierarchy of business. The 
country town and the townsmen are by way of becoming ways and means in the hands 
of Big Business. Barring accidents, bolshevism, and the acts of God or the 
United States Congress, such would appear to be the drift of things in the 
calculable future, that is to say, in the absence of disturbing causes.
This does not mean that the country town is on the decline in point of 
population or the volume of its traffic; but only that the once masterless 
retailer is coming in for a master, that the retail trade is being standardized 
and re-parcelled by and in behalf of those massive vested interests that move 
obscurely in the background, and that these vested interests in the background 
now have the first call on the "income strewn that flows from the farms through 
the country town. Nor does it imply that that spirit of self-help and collusive 
cupidity that made and animated the country town at its best, has faded out of 
the mentality of this people. It has only moved upward and onward to higher 
duties and wider horizons. Even if it should appear that the self-acting 
collusive storekeeper and banker of the nineteenth-century country town "lies a-
mouldering in his grave," yet "his soul goes marching on." It is only that the 
same stock of men with the same traditions and ideals are doing Big Business on 
the same general plan on which the country town was built. And these men who 
know the country town "from the ground up" now find it ready to their hand, 
ready to be turned to account according to the methods and principles bred in 
their own bone. And the habit of mind induced by and conducive to business-as-
usual is much the same whether the balance-sheet runs in four figures or in 
eight.

It is an unhappy circumstance that all this plain speaking about the country 
town, its traffic, its animating spirit, and its standards of merit, unavoidably 
has an air of finding fault. But even slight reflection will show that this 
appearance is unavoidable even where there is no inclination to disparage. It 
lies in the nature of the case, unfortunately. No unprejudiced inquiry into the 
facts can content itself with anything short of plain speech, and in this 
connexion plain speech has an air of disparagement because it has been the 
unbroken usage to avoid plain speech touching these things, these motives, aims, 
principles, ways and means and achievements of these substantial citizens and 
their business and fortunes. But for all that, all these substantial citizens 
and their folks, fortunes, works, and opinions are no less substantial and 
meritorious, in fact. Indeed one can scarcely appreciate the full measure of 
their stature, substance and achievements, and more particularly the moral costs 
of their great work in developing the country and taking over its resources, 
without putting it all in plain terms, instead of the salesmanlike parables that 
have to be employed in the make-believe of trade and politics.
The country town and the business of its substantial citizens are and have ever 
been an enterprise in salesmanship; and the beginning of wisdom in salesmanship 
is equivocation. There is a decent measure of equivocation which runs its course 
on the hither side of prevarication or duplicity, and an honest salesman - such 
"an honest man as will bear watching" - will endeavour to confine his best 
efforts to this highly moral zone where stands the upright man who is not under 
oath to tell the whole truth. But "self-preservation knows no moral law"; and it 
is not to be overlooked that there habitually enter into the retail trade of the 
country towns many competitors who do not falter at prevarication and who even 
do not hesitate at outright duplicity; and it will not do for an honest man to 
let the rogues get away with the best - or any - of the trade, at the risk of 
too narrow a margin of profit on his own business-that is to say a narrower 
margin than might be had in the absence of scruple. And then there is always the 
base line of what the law allows; and what the law allows can not be far wrong. 
Indeed, the sane presumption will be that whoever lives within the law has no 
need to quarrel with his conscience. And a sound principle will be to improve 
the hour to-day and, if worse comes to worst, let the courts determine to-
morrow, under protest, just what the law allows, and therefore what the moral 
code exacts. And then, too, it is believed and credible that the courts will be 
wise enough to see that the law is not allowed to apply with such effects as to 
impede the volume or narrow the margins of business-as-usual.
"He either fears his fate too much, or his deserts are small, Who dare not put 
it to the touch" and take a chance with the legalities and moralities for once 
in a way, when there is easy money in sight and no one is looking, particularly 
in case his own solvency - that is his life as a business-concern - should be in 
the balance. Solvency is always a meritorious work, however it may be achieved 
or maintained; and so long as one is quite sound on this main count one is sound 
on the whole, and can afford to forget peccadilloes, within reason. The country-
town code of morality at large, as well as its code of business-ethics, is quite 
sharp, meticulous; but solvency always has a sedative value in these premises, 
at large and in personal detail. And then, too, solvency not only puts a man in 
the way of acquiring merit, but it makes him over into a substantial citizen 
whose opinions and preferences have weight and who is therefore enabled to do 
much good for his fellow-citizens - that is to say, shape them somewhat to his 
own pattern. To create mankind in one's own image is a work that partakes of the 
divine, and it is a high privilege which the substantial citizen commonly makes 
the most of. Evidently this salesmanlike pursuit of the net gain has a high 
cultural value at the same time that it is invaluable as a means to a 
competence.
The country-town pattern of moral agent and the code of morals and proprieties, 
manners and customs, which come -up out of this life of salesmanship, are such 
as this unremitting habituation is fit to produce. The scheme of conduct for the 
business man and for "his sisters and his cousins and his aunts" is a scheme of 
salesmanship, seven days in the week. And the rule of life of country-town 
salesmanship is summed up in what the older logicians have called suppressio 
veri and suggestio falsi. The dominant note of this life is circumspection.(3*) 
One must avoid offence, cultivate good will, at any reasonable cost, and 
continue unfailing in taking advantage of it; and, as a corollary to this axiom, 
one should be ready to recognize and recount the possible shortcomings of one's 
neighbours, for neighbours are (or may be) rivals in the trade, and in trade one 
man's loss is another's gain, and a rival's disabilities count in among one's 
assets and should not be allowed to go to waste.
[442] One must be circumspect, acquire merit, and avoid offence. So one must 
eschew opinions, or information, which are not acceptable to the common run of 
those whose good will has or may conceivably come to have any commercial value. 
The country-town system of knowledge and belief can admit nothing that would 
annoy the prejudices of any appreciable number of the respectable townsfolk. So 
it becomes a system of intellectual, institutional, and religious hold-overs. 
The country town is conservative; aggressively and truculently so, since any 
assertion or denial that runs counter to any appreciable set of respectable 
prejudices would come in for some degree of disfavour, and any degree of 
disfavour is intolerable to men whose business would presumably suffer by it, 
Whereas there is no (business) harm done in assenting to, and so in time coming 
to believe in, any or all of the commonplaces of the day before yesterday. In 
this sense the country town is conservative, in that it is by force of business-
expediency intolerant of anything but holdovers. Intellectually, 
institutionally, and religiously, the country towns of the great farming-country 
are "standing pat" on the ground taken somewhere about the period of the Civil 
War; or according to the wider chronology, somewhere about Mid-Victorian times. 
And the men of affairs and responsibility in public life, who have passed the 
test of country-town fitness, as they must, are men who have come through and 
made good according to the canons of faith and conduct imposed by this system of 
hold-overs.
Again it seems necessary to enter the caution that in so speaking of this system 
of country-town holdovers and circumspection there need be no hint of 
disparagement. The colloquial speech of our time, outside of the country-town 
hives of expedient respectability, carries a note of disallowance and disclaimer 
in all that it has to say of hold-overs; which is an unfortunate but inherent 
defect of the language, and which it is necessary to discount and make ones 
peace with. It is only that outside of the country towns, where human 
intelligence has not yet gone into abeyance and where human speech accordingly 
is in continued process of remaking, sentiment and opinion Tun to the unhappy 
effect which this implicit disparagement of these hold-overs discloses.
Indeed, there is much, or at least something, to be said to the credit of this 
country-town system of holdovers, with its canons of salesmanship and 
circumspection. It has to its credit many deeds of Christian charity and 
Christian faith. It may be - as how should it not? - that many of these deeds of 
faith and charity are done in the businesslike hope that they will have some 
salutary effect on the doer's balance-sheet; but the opaque fact remains that 
these business men do these things, and it is to be presumed that they would 
rather not discuss the ulterior motives.
It is a notorious commonplace among those who get their living by promoting 
enterprises of charity and good deeds in general, that no large enterprise of 
this description can be carried through to a successful and lucrative issue 
without due appeal to the country towns and due support by the businesslike 
townsmen and their associates and accessory folks. And it is likewise notorious 
that the country-town community of business men and substantial households will 
endorse, and contribute to virtually any enterprise of the sort, and ask few 
questions. The effectual interest which prompts the endorsement of and visible 
contribution to these enterprises is a salesmanlike interest in the "prestige 
value" that comes to those persons who endorse and visibly contribute; and 
perhaps even more insistently, there is the loss of "prestige value" that would 
come to anyone who should dare to omit due endorsement of and contribution to 
any ostensibly public-spirited enterprise of this kind that has caught the vogue 
and does not violate the system of prescriptive hold-overs.
Other interest there may well be, as, e.g., human charity or Christian charity - 
that is to say solicitude for the salvation of one's soul - but without due 
appeal to salesmanlike respectability the clamour of any certified solicitor of 
these good deeds will be but as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. One need 
only try to picture what would be the fate, e.g., of the campaigns and 
campaigners, for Red Cross, famine-relief, Liberty Bonds, foreign missions, 
Interchurch fund, and the like, in the absence of such appeal and of the due 
response. It may well be, of course, that the salesmanlike townsman endorses 
with the majority and pays his contribution as a mulct, under compunction of 
expediency, as a choice between evils, for fear of losing good will. But the 
main fact remains. It may perhaps all foot up to this with the common run, that 
no man who values his salesmanlike well-being will dare follow his own untoward 
propensity in dealing with these certified enterprises in good deeds, and speak 
his profane mind to the certified campaigners. But it all comes to the same in 
the upshot. The substantial townsman is shrewd perhaps, or at least he aims to 
be, and it may well be that with a shrewd man's logic he argues that two birds 
in the bush are worth more than one in the hand; and so pays his due peace-
offering to the certified solicitor of good deeds, somewhat in the spirit of 
those addicts of the faith who once upon a time bought Papal indulgences. But 
when all is said, it works; and that it does so, and that these many adventures 
and adventurers in certified mercy and humanity are so enabled to subsist in any 
degree of prosperity and comfort is to be credited, for the major part, to the 
salesmanlike tact of the substantial citizens of the country towns.
One hesitates to imagine what would be the fate of the foreign missions, e.g., 
in the absence of this salesmanlike solicitude for the main chance in the 
country towns. And there is perhaps less comfort in reflecting on what would be 
the terms of liquidation for those many churches and churchmen that now adorn 
the land, if they were driven to rest their fortunes on unconstrained gifts from 
de facto worshippers moved by the first-hand fear of God, in the absence of that 
more bounteous subvention that so comes in from the quasi-consecrated 
respectable townsmen who are so constrained by their salesmanlike fear of a 
possible decline in their prestige.
Any person who is seriously addicted to devout observances and who takes his 
ecclesiastical verities at their face might be moved to deprecate this 
dependence of the good cause on these mixed motives. But there is no need of 
entertaining doubts here as to the ulterior goodness of these businesslike 
incentives. Seen in perspective from the outside - as any economist must view 
these matters - it should seem to be the part of wisdom, for the faithful and 
for their businesslike benefactors alike, to look steadfastly to the good end 
and leave ulterior questions of motive on one side. There is also some reason to 
believe that such a view of the whole matter is not infrequently acted upon. And 
when all is said and allowed for, the main fact remains, that in the absence of 
this spirit of what may without offence be called salesmanlike pusillanimity in 
the country towns, both the glory of God and the good of man would be less 
bountiful [443] served, on all these issues that engage the solicitors of good 
deeds.

This system of innocuous hold-overs, then, makes up, what may be called the 
country-town profession of faith, spiritual and secular. And so it comes to pass 
that the same general system of hold-overs imposes its bias on the reputable 
organs of expression throughout the community - pulpit, public press, courts, 
schools - and dominates the conduct of public affairs; inasmuch as the 
constituency of the country-town, in the main and the everyday run, shapes the 
course of reputable sentiment and conviction for the American community at 
large. Not because of any widely prevalent aggressive preference for that sort 
of thing, perhaps, but rather because it would scarcely be a "sound business 
proposition" to run counter to the known interests of the ruling class; that is 
to say, the substantial citizens and their folks. But the effect is much the 
same and will scarcely be denied.
It will be seen that in substantial effect this country-town system of hold-
overs is of what would be called a "salutary" character; that is to say, it is 
somewhat intolerantly conservative. It is a system of professions and avowals, 
which may perhaps run to no deeper ground than a salesmanlike pusillanimity, but 
the effect is much the same. In the country-town community and its outlying 
ramifications, as in any community of men, the professions made and insisted on 
will unavoidably shape the effectual scheme of knowledge and belief. Such is the 
known force of inveterate habit. To the young generation the prescriptive hold-
overs are handed down as self-evident and immutable principles of reality, and 
the (reputable) schools can allow themselves no latitude and no question. And 
what is more to the point, men and women come to believe in the truths which 
they profess, on whatever ground, provided only that they continue stubbornly to 
profess them. Their professions may have come out of expedient make-believe, 
but, all the same, they serve as premises in all the projects, reflections, and 
reverie of these folks who profess them. And it will be only an provocation of 
harsh and protracted exposure to material facts running unbroken to the 
contrary, that the current of their sentiments and convictions can he brought to 
range outside of the lines drawn for them by these professed articles of truth.
The case is illustrated, e. g., by the various and widely varying systems of 
religious verities current among the outlying peoples, the peoples of the lower 
cultures, each and several of which are indubitably and immutably truthful to 
their respective believers, throughout all the bizarre web of their incredible 
conceits and grotesqueries, none of which will bear the light of alien 
scrutiny.(4*) Having come in for these professions of archaic make-believe, and 
continuing stubbornly to profess implicit faith in these things as a hopeful 
sedative of the wrath to come, these things come to hedge about the scheme of 
knowledge and belief as well as the scheme of what is to be done or left undone. 
In much the same way the country-town system of prescriptive hold-overs has gone 
into action as the safe and, sane body of American, common sense, until it is 
now self-evident to American public sentiment that any derangement of these 
hold-overs, would bring the affairs of the human race to a disastrous collapse. 
And all the while the material conditions are progressively drawing together 
into such shape that this plain country-town common sense will no longer work.
THORSTEIN; VEBLEN.

NOTES:
1) "The great American game," they say, is Poker. Just why Real Estate should 
not come in for honourable mention in that way is not to be explained offhand. 
And an extended exposition of the reasons why would be tedious and perhaps 
distasteful, besides calling for such expert discrimination as quite exceeds the 
powers of a layman in these premises. But even persons who are laymen on both 
heads will recognize the same family traits in both.
2) The round numbers named above are safe and conservative, particularly so long 
as the question concerns the staple country towns of the great farming-regions, 
As has already been remarked, they are only less securely applicable in the case 
of similar towns in the industrial and outlying parts of the country. To some 
they may seem large and loose. They are based on a fairly exhaustive study of 
statistical materials gathered by special inquiry in the spring of [420] 1918 
for the Statistical Division of the Food Administration but not published 
hitherto.
There has been little detailed or concrete discussion of the topic. See, 
however, a very brief paper by Isador Lubin on "The Economic Costs of Retail 
Distribution," published in the Twenty-second Report of the Michigan Academy of 
Science, which runs in great part on the same material.
It is, or should be, unnecessary to add that the retail trade of the country-
towns is neither a unique nor an extravagant development of business as usual. 
It is in fact very much the sort of thing that is to be met with in the retail 
trade anywhere, in America and elsewhere.
3) It might also be called salesmanlike pusillanimity.
4) There is, of course, no call in this Christian land to throw up a doubt or 
question touching any of the highly remarkable verities of the Christian 
confession at large. While it will be freely admitted on all hands that many of 
the observances and beliefs current among the "non-Christian tribes" are 
grotesque and palpable errors of mortal mind; it must at the same time, and 
indeed by the same token, be equally plain to any person of cultivated tastes in 
religious superstition, and with a sound bias, that the corresponding 
convolutions of unreason in the Christian faith are in the nature of a divine 
coagulum of the true, the beautiful, and the good, as it was in the beginning, 
is now, and ever shall be; world without end! But all the while it evident that 
all these "beastly devices of the heathen," just referred to, are true, 
beautiful and good to their benighted apprehension only because their 
apprehension has been benighted by their stubborn profession of these articles 
of misguides make-believe, through the generations; which is the point of the 
argument.
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