nvisible wealth has been exploiting the most vital interests of
foreign countries. Veblen would go so far as to say that wars are
government-made, that patriotism is exploited by governments in
advance of pre-arranged hostilities to produce the spirit of war (97).

If we hold that these economic causes are now the most important
causes of wars, it is easy to accept the conclusion that the most
fundamental, and even perhaps the sole cause of war is the evil
principle of ownership, as is actually maintained by many economists.
If men in cliques, and men as individuals did not own privately great
parts of the wealth of the world, these conflicts in which wealth and
its distribution are the most vital interests would not take place.
Many socialists, we know, hold these views, asserting that wars are
due solely to industrial competition among nations, and to the fact
that industrialism is based upon the wholly wrong principle of private
ownership. Hullquist, a socialist, says that wars are likely to become
more frequent and more violent as the capitalist system of production
approaches its climax. The working classes, the socialists say, who
have nothing permanent, are the natural enemies of war; the
capitalists, who have much and want more, are constantly placing peace
in jeopardy. The protective system of tariff also receives much abuse
from these writers. Novicow (71) places the tariff system high among
the causes of war. The belief that it is good to sell and bad to buy,
he says, is the great trouble maker in the world. This was also the
principle of Cobden the great English free-trader of the middle of the
last century. The Manchester school of which he was the leader would
do away with wars by making the world economically a unit.

Veblen (97) charges the price system with being a fundamental cause of
war, and says that it must now come up for radical examination and
perhaps modification. The theory of the rights of property and
contract which have been taken as axiomatic premises by economic
science may itself fail, or at least be thrown open to question.
Either the price system will go, or there will be wars between nations
in the future as there have been in the past, because of the need of
protection of ownership rights, and because of the nationalism these
rights create. To some extent these rights of property _have_ been
curtailed, Veblen remarks; the old feudalistic rights have in large
part been annulled, and