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The author of this book remarks upon the relation of his own inquiry to that of Kant's famous essay, Zum ewigen Frieden. Throughout Kant's work, he tells us, "there runs a tenacious persuasion that, in the end, the regime of peace will be installed. Not as a deliberate achievement of human wisdom, so much as a work of Nature the Designer of things—Natura dædala rerum." In our times, on the contrary, nature is "no longer allowed to go on her own recognizances without divulging the ways and means of her workmanship." The answer to questions how general peace is to be secured and maintained and the consequences likely to follow from its installation "is here sought not in terms of what ought dutifully to be done toward the desired consummation, but rather in terms of those known factors of human behavior that can be shown by analysis of experience to control the conduct of nations in conjunctures of this kind" (p. viii).
So much for Professor Veblen's program. The specific measures which he advocates for advancing the likelihood of a general peace at the present time are not easy to state adequately in summary, but appear to involve a league or alliance on the part of the more democratic and pacific nations, and the elimination of Germany as a future disturber of the peace. Such a league is, however, not in itself sufficient, without a change in the prevailing system of competitive prices and property ownership. So long as these latter arrangements are left untouched, the cessation of war between nations would almost certainly create conditions out of which would grow the war of economic classes. "So, if the projectors of this peace at large are in any degree inclined to seek concessive terms on which the peace might hopefully be made enduring, it should evidently be part of their endeavors from the outset to put events in train for the present abatement and eventual abrogation of the rights of ownership and of the price-system in which these rights take effect. ... On the other hand, if peace is not desired at the cost of relinquishing the scheme of competitive gain and competitive spending, the promoters of peace should logically observe due precaution and move only so far in the direction of a peaceful settlement as would result in a sufficiently unstable equilibrium of mutual jealousies; such as might expeditiously be upset whenever discontent with pecuniary affairs should come to threaten this established scheme of pecuniary prerogatives" (p. 367).
The passage just quoted, with which the volume ends, is indicative of its general tone and temper, and enables one at once to recognize the type of
