Edward William Thomson - "Old Man Savarin and Other Stories"

Charles Felton Pidgin - "The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks"

James Parton - "Captains of Industry"

Fredrika Bremer - "Strife and Peace"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation

T >> Thorstein Veblen >> An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation




Like other preparation for hostilities this reduction of the country to
the status of a self-contained economic organisation is costly, but
like other preparation for hostilities it also puts the nation in a
position of greater readiness to break off friendly relations with its
neighbors. It is a war measure, commonly spoken for by its advocates as
a measure of self-defense; but whatever the merits of the
self-defenders' contention, this measure is a war measure. As such it
can reasonably claim no hearing in the counsels of a pacific league of
neutrals, whose purpose it is to make war impracticable. Particularly
can there be no reasonable question of admitting a policy of trade
discrimination and isolation on the part of a nation which has, for
purposes of warlike aggression, pursued such a policy in the past, and
which it is the immediate purpose of the league to bind over to keep the
peace.

There has been a volume of loose talk spent on the justice and
expediency of boycotting the trade of the peoples of the Empire after
the return of peace, as a penalty and as a preventive measure designed
to retard their recovery of strength with which to enter on a further
warlike enterprise. Such a measure would necessarily be somewhat futile;
since "Business is business," after all, and the practical limitations
imposed on an unprofitable boycott by the moral necessity to buy cheap
and sell dear that rests on all businessmen would surreptitiously
mitigate it to the point of negligibility. It is inconceivable--or it
would be inconceivable in the absence of imbecile politicians and
self-seeking businessmen--that measures looking to the trade isolation
of any one of these countries could be entertained as a point of policy
to be pursued by a league of neutrals. And it is only in so far as
patriotic jealousy and vindictive sentiments are allowed to displace the
aspiration for peace and security, that such measures can claim
consideration. Considered as a penalty to be imposed on the erring
nations who set this warlike adventure afoot, it should be sufficiently
plain that such a measure as a trade boycott could not touch the chief
offenders, or even their responsible abettors. It would, rather, play
into the hands of the militarist interests by keeping alive the spirit
of national jealousy and international hatred, out of which wars arise
and without which warlike enterprise might hopefully be expected to
disappear out of the scheme of human intercourse. The punishment would
fall, as all economic burdens and disabilities must always fall, on the
common man, the underlying population.

The chief relation of this common run, this underlying population of
German subjects, to the inception and pursuit of this Imperial warlike
enterprise, is comprised in the fact that they are an underlying
population of subjects, held in usufruct by the Imperial establishment
and employed at will. It is true, they have lent themselves unreservedly
to the uses for which the dynasty has use for them, and they have
entered enthusiastically into the warlike adventure set afoot by the
dynastic statesmen; but that they have done so is their misfortune
rather than their fault. By use and wont and indoctrination they have
for long been unremittingly, and helplessly, disciplined into a spirit
of dynastic loyalty, national animosity and servile abnegation; until it
would be nothing better than a pathetic inversion of all the equities of
the case to visit the transgressions of their masters upon the common
run; whose fault lies, after all, in their being an underlying
population of subjects, who have not had a chance to reach that
spiritual level on which they could properly be held accountable for the
uses to which they are turned. It is true, men are ordinarily punished
for their misfortunes; but the warlike enterprise of the Imperial
dynasty has already brought what might fairly be rated as a good measure
of punishment on this underlying populace, whose chief fault and chief
misfortune lies in an habitual servile abnegation of those traits of
initiative and discretion in man that constitute him an agent
susceptible of responsibility or retribution.

It would be all the more of a pathetic mockery to visit the
transgressions of their masters on these victims of circumstance and
dynastic mendacity, since the conventionalities of international equity
will scarcely permit the high responsible parties in the case to be
chastised with any penalty harsher than a well-mannered figure of
speech. To serve as a deterrent, the penalty must strike the point where
vests the discretion; but servile use and wont is still too well intact
in these premises to let any penalty touch the guilty core of a
profligate dynasty. Under the wear and tear of continued war and its
incident continued vulgarisation of the directorate and responsible
staff among the pacific allies, the conventional respect of persons is
likely to suffer appreciable dilapidation; but there need be no
apprehension of such a loss of decent respect for personages as would
compromise the creature comforts of that high syndicate of personages on
whose initiative the Fatherland entered upon this enterprise in
dominion.

Bygone shortcomings and transgressions can have no reasonable place in
the arrangements by which a pacific league of neutrals designs to keep
the peace. Neither can bygone prerogatives and precedents of
magnificence and of mastery, except in so far as they unavoidably must
come into play through the inability of men to divest themselves of
their ingrained preconceptions, by virtue of which a Hohenzollern or a
Hapsburger is something more formidable and more to be considered than a
recruiting sergeant or a purveyor of light literature. The league can do
its work of pacification only by elaborately forgetting differences and
discrepancies of the kind that give rise to international grievances.
Which is the same as saying that the neutralisation of national
discriminations and pretensions will have to go all the way, if it is to
serve. But this implies, as broadly as need be, that the pacific nations
who make the league and provisionally administer its articles of
agreement and jurisdiction, can not exempt themselves from any of the
leveling measures of neutralisation to which the dynastic suspects among
them are to be subject. It would mean a relinquishment of all those
undemocratic institutional survivals out of which international
grievances are wont to arise. As a certain Danish adage would have it,
the neutrals of the league must all be shorn over the same comb.

* * * * *

What is to be shorn over this one comb of neutralisation and democracy
is all those who go into the pacific league of neutrals and all who come
under its jurisdiction, whether of their own choice or by the
necessities of the case. It is of the substance of the case that those
peoples who have been employed in the campaigns of the German-Imperial
coalition are to come in on terms of impartial equality with those who
have held the ground against them; to come under the jurisdiction, and
prospectively into the copartnery, of the league of neutrals--all on the
presumption that the Imperial coalition will be brought to make peace on
terms of unconditional surrender.

Let it not seem presumptuous to venture on a recital of summary
specifications intended to indicate the nature of those concrete
measures which would logically be comprised in a scheme of pacification
carried out with such a view to impartial equality among the peoples who
are to make up the projected league. There is a significant turn of
expression that recurs habitually in the formulation of terms put forth
by the spokesmen of the Entente belligerents, where it is insisted that
hostilities are carried on not against the German people or the other
peoples associated with them, but only against the Imperial
establishments and their culpable aids and abettors in the enterprise.
So it is further insisted that there is no intention to bring pains and
penalties on these peoples, who so have been made use of by their
masters, but only on the culpable master class whose tools these peoples
have been. And later, just now (January 1917), and from a responsible
and disinterested spokesman for the pacific league, there comes the
declaration that a lasting peace at the hands of such a league can be
grounded only in a present "peace without victory."

The mutual congruity of these two declarations need not imply collusion,
but they are none the less complementary propositions and they are none
the less indicative of a common trend of convictions among the men who
are best able to speak for those pacific nations that are looked to as
the mainstay of the prospective league. They both converge to the point
that the objective to be achieved is not victory for the Entente
belligerents but defeat for the German-Imperial coalition; that the
peoples underlying the defeated governments are not to be dealt with as
vanquished enemies but as fellows in undeserved misfortune brought on by
their culpable masters; and that no advantage is designed to be taken of
these peoples, and no gratuitous hardship to be imposed on them. Their
masters are evidently to be put away, not as defeated antagonists but as
a public nuisance to be provided against as may seem expedient for the
peace and security of those nations whom they have been molesting.

Taking this position as outlined, it should not be extremely difficult
to forecast the general line of procedure which it would logically
demand,--barring irrelevant regard for precedents and overheated
resentment, and provided that the makers of these peace terms have a
free hand and go to their work with an eye single to the establishment
of an enduring peace. The case of Germany would be typical of all the
rest; and the main items of the bill in this case would seem logically
to run somewhat as follows:

(1) The definitive elimination of the Imperial establishment, together
with the monarchical establishments of the several states of the Empire
and the privileged classes;

(2) Removal or destruction of all warlike equipment, military and naval,
defensive and offensive;

(3) Cancelment of the public debt, of the Empire and of its
members--creditors of the Empire being accounted accessory to the
culpable enterprise of the Imperial government;

(4) Confiscation of such industrial equipment and resources as have
contributed to the carrying on of the war, as being also accessory;

(5) Assumption by the league at large of all debts incurred, by the
Entente belligerents or by neutrals, for the prosecution or by reason of
the war, and distribution of the obligation so assumed, impartially
among the members of the league, including the peoples of the defeated
nations;

(6) Indemnification for all injury done to civilians in the invaded
territories; the means for such indemnification to be procured by
confiscation of all estates in the defeated countries exceeding a
certain very modest maximum, calculated on the average of property
owned, say, by the poorer three-fourths of the population,--the kept
classes being properly accounted accessory to the Empire's culpable
enterprise.

The proposition to let the war debt be shared by all members of the
league on a footing of impartial equality may seem novel, and perhaps
extravagant. But all projects put forth for safeguarding the world's
peace by a compact among the pacific nations run on the patent, though
often tacit, avowal that the Entente belligerents are spending their
substance and pledging their credit for the common cause. Among the
Americans, the chief of the neutral nations, this is coming to be
recognised more and more overtly. So that, in this instance at least, no
insurmountable reluctance to take over their due share of the common
burden should fairly be looked for, particularly when it appears that
the projected league, if it is organised on a footing of neutrality,
will relieve the republic of virtually all outlay for their own defense.

Of course, there is, in all this, no temerarious intention to offer
advice as to what should be done by those who have it to do, or even to
sketch the necessary course which events are bound to take. As has been
remarked in another passage, that would have to be a work of prophesy or
of effrontery, both of which, it is hoped, lie equally beyond the
horizon of this inquiry; which is occupied with the question of what
conditions will logically have to be met in order to an enduring peace,
not what will be the nature and outcome of negotiations entered into by
astute delegates pursuing the special advantage, each of his own nation.
And yet the peremptory need of reaching some practicable arrangement
whereby the peace may be kept, goes to say that even the most astute
negotiations will in some degree be controlled by that need, and may
reasonably be expected to make some approach to the simple and obvious
requirements of the situation.

* * * * *

Therefore the argument returns to the United Kingdom and the probable
limit of tolerance of that people, in respect of what they are likely to
insist on as a necessary measure of democratisation in the nations of
the second part, and what measure of national abnegation they are likely
to accommodate themselves to. The United Kingdom is indispensable to the
formation of a pacific league of neutrals. And the British terms of
adhesion, or rather of initiation of such a league, therefore, will have
to constitute the core of the structure, on which details may be
adjusted and to which concessive adjustments will have to be made by all
the rest. This is not saying that the projected league must or will be
dominated by the United Kingdom or administered in the British interest.
Indeed, it can not well be made to serve British particular interests in
any appreciable degree, except at the cost of defeat to its main
purpose; since the purposes of an enduring peace can be served only by
an effectual neutralisation of national claims and interests. But it
would mean that the neutralisation of national interests and
discriminations to be effected would have to be drawn on lines
acceptable to British taste in these matters, and would have to go
approximately so far as would be dictated by the British notions of what
is expedient, and not much farther. The pacific league of neutrals would
have much of a British air, but "British" in this connection is to be
taken as connoting the English-speaking countries rather than as
applying to the United Kingdom alone; since the entrance of the British
into the league would involve the entrance of the British colonies, and,
indeed, of the American republic as well.

The temper and outlook of this British community, therefore, becomes a
matter of paramount importance in any attempted analysis of the
situation resulting after the war, or of any prospective course of
conduct to be entered on by the pacific nations. And the question
touches not so much the temper and preconceptions of the British
community as known in recent history, but rather as it is likely to be
modified by the war experience. So that the practicability of a neutral
league comes to turn, in great measure, on the effect which this war
experience is having on the habits of thought of the British people, or
on that section of the British population which will make up the
effectual majority when the war closes. The grave interest that attaches
to this question must serve as justification for pursuing it farther,
even though there can be no promise of a definite or confident answer to
be found beforehand.

Certain general assertions may be made with some confidence. The
experiences of the war, particularly among the immediate participants
and among their immediate domestic connections--a large and increasing
proportion of the people at large--are plainly impressing on them the
uselessness and hardship of such a war. There can be no question but
they are reaching a conviction that a war of this modern kind and scale
is a thing to be avoided if possible. They are, no doubt, willing to go
to very considerable lengths to make a repetition of it impossible, and
they may reasonably be expected to go farther along that line before
peace returns. But the lengths to which they are ready to go may be in
the way of concessions, or in the way of contest and compulsion. There
need be no doubt but a profound and vindictive resentment runs through
the British community, and there is no reason to apprehend that this
will be dissipated in the course of further hostilities; although it
should fairly be expected to lose something of its earlier exuberant
malevolence and indiscrimination, more particularly if hostilities
continue for some time. It is not too much to expect, that this popular
temper of resentment will demand something very tangible in the way of
summary vengeance on those who have brought the hardships of war upon
the nation.

The manner of retribution which would meet the popular demand for
"justice" to be done on the enemy is likely to be affected by the
fortunes of war, as also the incidence of it. Should the governmental
establishment and the discretion still vest in the gentlemanly classes
at the close of hostilities, the retribution is likely to take the
accustomed gentlemanly shape of pecuniary burdens imposed on the people
of the defeated country, together with diplomatically specified
surrender of territorial and colonial possessions, and the like; such as
to leave the _de facto_ enemy courteously on one side, and to yield
something in the way of pecuniary benefit to the gentlemen-investors in
charge, and something more in the way of new emoluments of office to the
office-holding class included in the same order of gentlemen. The
retribution in the case would manifestly fall on the underlying
population in the defeated country, without seriously touching the
responsible parties, and would leave the defeated nation with a new
grievance to nourish its patriotic animosity and with a new incentive
to a policy of watchful waiting for a chance of retaliation.

But it is to be noted that under the stress of the war there is going
forward in the British community a progressive displacement of
gentlemanly standards and official procedure by standards and procedure
of a visibly underbred character, a weakening of the hold of the
gentlemanly classes on the control of affairs and a weakening of the
hold which the sacred rights of property, investment and privilege have
long had over the imagination of the British people. Should hostilities
continue, and should the exigencies of the war situation continue to
keep the futility of these sacred rights, as well as the fatuity of
their possessors, in the public eye, after the same fashion as hitherto,
it would not be altogether unreasonable to expect that the discretion
would pass into the hands of the underbred, or into the hands of men
immediately and urgently accountable to the underbred. In such a case,
and with a constantly growing popular realisation that the directorate
and responsible enemy in the war is the Imperial dynasty and its
pedigreed aids and abettors, it is conceivable that the popular
resentment would converge so effectually on these responsible
instigators and directors of misfortune as to bring the incidence of the
required retribution effectually to bear on them. The outcome might, not
inconceivably, be the virtual erasure of the Imperial dynasty, together
with the pedigreed-class rule on which it rests and the apparatus of
irresponsible coercion through which it works, in the Fatherland and in
its subsidiaries and dependencies.

With a sufficiently urgent realisation of their need of peace and
security, and with a realisation also that the way to avoid war is to
avoid the ways and means of international jealousy and of the national
discriminations out of which international jealousy grows, it is
conceivable that a government which should reflect the British temper
and the British hopes might go so far in insisting on a neutralisation
of the peoples of the Fatherland as would leave them without the
dynastic apparatus with which warlike enterprise is set afoot, and so
leave them also perforce in a pacific frame of mind. In time, in the
absence of their dearly beloved leavings of feudalism, an enforced
reliance on their own discretion and initiative, and an enforced respite
from the rant and prance of warlike swagger, would reasonably be
expected to grow into a popular habit. The German people are by no means
less capable of tolerance and neighbourly decorum than their British or
Scandinavian neighbours of the same blood,--if they can only be left to
their own devices, untroubled by the maggoty conceit of national
domination.

There is no intention herewith to express an expectation that this
out-and-out neutralisation of the Fatherland's international relations
and of its dynastic government will come to pass on the return of peace,
or that the German people will, as a precaution against recurrent
Imperial rabies, be organised on a democratic pattern by constraint of
the pacific nations of the league. The point is only that this measure
of neutralisation appears to be the necessary condition, in the absence
of which no such neutral league can succeed, and that so long as the war
goes on there is something of a chance that the British community may in
time reach a frame of mind combining such settled determination to
safeguard the peace at all costs, with such a degree of disregard for
outworn conventions, that their spokesmen in the negotiations may push
the neutralisation of these peoples to that length.

The achievement of such an outcome would evidently take time as well as
harsh experience, more time and harsher experience, perhaps, than one
likes to contemplate.

Most men, therefore, would scarcely rate the chance of such an outcome
at all high. And yet it is to be called to mind that the war has lasted
long and the effect of its demands and its experience has already gone
far, and that the longer it lasts the greater are the chances of its
prolongation and of its continued hardships, at least to the extent that
with every month of war that passes the prospect of the allied nations
making peace on any terms short of unconditional surrender grows less.
And unconditional surrender is the first step in the direction of an
unconditional dispossession of the Imperial establishment and its war
prophets,--depending primarily on the state of mind of the British
people at the time. And however unlikely, it is also always possible, as
some contend, that in the course of further war experience the common
man in the Fatherland may come to reflect on the use and value of the
Imperial establishment, with the result of discarding and disowning it
and all its works. Such an expectation would doubtless underrate the
force of ancient habit, and would also involve a misapprehension of the
psychological incidence of a warlike experience. The German people have
substantially none of those preconceptions of independence and
self-direction to go on, in the absence of which an effectual revulsion
against dynastic rule can not come to pass.

Embedded in the common sense of the British population at large is a
certain large and somewhat sullen sense of fair dealing. In this they
are not greatly different from their neighbours, if at all, except that
the body of common sense in which this British sense of fair dealing
lies embedded is a maturer fashion of common sense than that which
serves to guide the workday life of many of their neighbours. And the
maturity in question appears to be chiefly a matter of their having
unlearned, divested themselves of, or been by force of disuse divested
of, an exceptionally large proportion of that burden of untoward
conceits which western Europe, and more particularly middle Europe, at
large has carried over from the Middle Ages. They have had time and
occasion to forget more of what the exigencies of modern life make it
expedient to have forgotten. And yet they are reputed slow,
conservative. But they have been well placed for losing much of what
would be well lost.

Among other things, their preconception of national animosity is not
secure, in the absence of provocation. They are now again in a position
to learn to do without some of the useless legacy out of the
past,--useless, that is, for life as it runs today, however it may be
rated in the setting in which it was all placed in that past out of
which it has come. And the question is whether now, under the pressure
of exigencies that make for a disestablishment of much cumbersome
inherited apparatus for doing what need not be done, they will be ruled
by their sense of expediency and of fair dealing to the extent of
cancelling out of their own scheme of life so much of this legacy of
conventional preconceptions as has now come visibly to hinder their own
material well-being, and at the same time to defeat that peace and
security for which they have shown themselves willing to fight. It is,
of course, a simpler matter to fight than it is to put away a
preconceived, even if it is a bootless, superstition; as, e.g., the
prestige of hereditary wealth, hereditary gentility, national
vainglory, and perhaps especially national hatred. But if the school is
hard enough and the discipline protracted enough there is no reason in
the nature of things why the common run of the British people should not
unlearn these futilities that once were the substance of things under an
older and outworn order. They have already shown their capacity for
divesting themselves of outworn institutional bonds, in discarding the
main substance of dynastic rule; and when they now come to face the
exigencies of this new situation it should cause no great surprise if
they are able to see their way to do what further is necessary to meet
these exigencies.

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