KEYNES CASTIGATED

Evening Post, Volume CXXVII, Issue 3, 5 January 1939, Page 5

KEYNES CASTIGATED

BOOK ON VERSAILLES

WHAT "THE TIMES" SAID

Considering that Oxford is a seat of learning, it has been rather amusing to notice, among some of the Government supporters in the by-election campaign, a certain readiness to suggest that opponents of the Government must be somewhat "academic" and unpractical people, says the "Manchester Guardian." The tendency is amusing but also characteristic; the party zealot who begins to be afraid that those awful "intellectuals" are against him often consoles himself with the reflection that the great heart of the simple British people must be beating warmly on his side.

Though he was not thinking specific- j ally of Oxford, one recent publicist had j a splendid phrase about "the working, as distinct from the talking and writing, classes" having been solidly on the side of Mr. Chamberlain. One gets the j hang of the idea quite easily; those mere word-spinners (who have been expressing themselves so clearly and lamentably) do not matter at all in comparison with the honest and inarticulate multitude who must be think- , ing right because they are so sensibly saying nothing (or so their earnest admirer not always safely assumes). A "CLEVER" BOOK. In moments of considerable embarrassment nothing befits some politicians of the bulldog breed better than a profound distrust of brains. What a scarifying Mr. John Maynard Keynes received nearly twenty years ago from scandalised apologists for the Versailles Treaty when he ventured to point out in a famous volume that a number of the provisions of that treaty just simply would not work. He was rebuked right and left as an academic trifler trespassing on territory that was. be-! yond him and should be properly reserved for level-headed politicians. "Mr. Keynes," began "The Times" review severely, "has written an. extremely 'clever' book on the Peace. Conference and its economic consequences.: It is the work of an erudite university! don. . . ." And after that damning! "clever," enclosed in quotation marks, there was no more to be said. Nevertheless, "The Times" of those distant and unconverted days went on to say it, and at two or three thousand words in length. Much of it makes curious reading now. Mr. Keynes. besides staggering under the awful burden of being "clever" and "erudite," was ethically unsound: "How, unless his bias had been throughout akin to that of the conscientious objector, could he place the Allies persistently on the same moral level as Germany in regard to the war?" CRY OF AN ACADEMICIAN. Well, it must have been partly due to that awful erudition of his, for, "as a whole, his cry against the. peace seems to us the cry of an academic mind accustomed to deal with the abstractions of that largely metaphysical exercise known as political economy." (O boy, where did that one go?) But even as a poor fish of a metaphysician Mr. Keynes's (then) thoroughly unsound morals would keep breaking in: "It is regrettable that even when dealing with this important subject Mr. Keynes should be unable to refrain from showing his special tenderness to Germany.... Despite the many sane ideas which it contains, Mr. Keynes's book is so vitiated by a persistent pro-' German bias that its value as a con-j tribution to the study of the economic consequences of the war is seriously j impaired." j However, it was admitted even in January, 1920 (when this most extensive review appeared), that the Peace] Treaty needed revision and that the League of Nations would supply the necessary machinery: "But if this necessary work should be approached in a spirit of forgetfulness of German 'guilt, of palliation for German crimes, of undifferentiated anxiety to help Germany to escape the consequences of her felony, it is not only bound to fail, but its failure will crush what remains of the interAllied solidarity that brought German schemes to naught."

But there was no cause to worry. The necessary work of revision by the League did not fail. It was never even tried —thanks to that good old-fash-ioned "war guilt" and "felony" complex so ably adumbrated in the lastquoted sentence. And now some people are so much in love with all things German that even the "Fuhreiy prinzip" can be earnestly recommended for English consumption. . . . Perhaps there was something to be said for a little "cleverness" that was not twenty years too late.