Marx rang louder than it ever had in the past; many pointed to the unemployed as prima facie evidence that Marx was right. The mumble of Veblen was discernible in the faddish vogue of the technocrats who wanted to call out not the proletariat but the engineers. And there was the still more chilling voice that never wearied of pointing out that Hitler and Mussolini knew what to do with their unemployed. In this welter of remedies and advocacy of desperate action, the voice of "The General Theory," the gentlemanly tones of Keynes, were certainly moderate and reassuring.

For while Keynes espoused a policy of managing capitalism, he was no opponent of private enterprise. "It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow citizens," he had written in "The General Theory," and he went on to state that if the Government would only concern itself with providing enough investment, the working of the vast bulk of the economy could and should be left to private initiative. In review, "The General Theory" was not a radical solution; it was, rather, an explanation of why an inescapable remedy should work. If an economy in the doldrums could drift indefinitely, the price of Government inaction might be graver by far than the consequences of bold unorthodoxy.

The real question was a moral, not an economic one. During the Second World War, Professor Hayek wrote a book, "The Road to Serfdom," which, for all its exaggerations, contained a deeply felt and sincere indictment of the overplanned economy. Keynes sympathized with and liked the book. But while praising it, he wrote to Hayek:

I should ** conclude rather differently. I should say that what we want is not no planning, or even less planning, indeed I should say we almost certainly want more. But the planning should take place in a community in which as many people as possible. both leaders and followers, wholly share your own moral position. Moderate planning will be safe enough if those carrying it out are rightly oriented in their own minds and hearts to the moral issue. This is in fact already true of some of them. But the curse is that there is also an important section who could be said to want planning not in order to enjoy its fruits, but because morally they hold ideas exactly the opposite of yours, and wish to serve not God but the devil.

Is this, perhaps, a naive hope? Can capitalism be managed-in the sense that Government planners will turn the faucet of investment on and off in such a way as to supplement, but never to displace, private investment? Certainly this is one of the central issues of today. But let us postpone discussion of it to the coming chapter.

For here we are dealing with the man Keynes and his beliefs, however misguided, idealistic, impractical, or salutary we may value them. And it would be a grave error in judgment to place this man, whose aim was to rescue capitalism, in the camp of those who want to submerge it. True, he urged the socialization of investment; but if he sacrificed the part, it was to save the whole.

For at heart he was a conservative and not much inclined to mask the fact. "How can I accept the (communistic) doctrine," he had written in 1931-when the point was by no means so clear to many others, "which sets up as its Bible, above and beyond criticism, an obsolete textbook which I know not only to be scientifically erroneous but without interest or application to the modern world? How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia, who with all

their faults, are the quality of life and surely carry the seeds of all human achievement?"

No, one might quibble with his theories, with his diagnosis, and with his cure-although, in justice, it must be said that no more thoughtful theory, no profounder diagnosis, and no more convincing cure has yet been propounded by those who insist that Keynes was only a mischievous meddler with a system that worked well enongh. But no one could gainsay his aim: The creation of a capitalist economy in which unemployment-the single greatest and gravest threat to its continuance would be forever eliminated.

He was a man incapable of doing only one thing at a time. While he was constructing "The General Theory" in his mind, he was building a theater in Cambridge with his pocketbook. It was a typically Keynesian venture. Starting at a loss, the theater was in the black in 2 years, and its artistic success was immense. Keynes was everywhere at the same time: financial backer, ticket taker (on one occasion when the clerk failed to materialize), husband of the leading lady (Lydia acted in Shakespeare, with extremely good notices), even concessionaire. He attached a restaurant to the theater and jealously watched its receipts, graphing them against different types of entertainment to ascertain how food consumption varied with the state of one's humor. There was a bar, too, where champagne was sold at a specially low discount to promote its wider consumption. It was probably the most pleasant interlude in his pleasant life.

But it did not go on for long. In 1937 his success story was cut short; he suffered a heart attack and was forced into idleness. Wellcomparative idleness. He continued to do an active trading business and to edit the Economic Journal and to write a few brilliant articles in defense of "The General Theory." One academician had said, upon its appearance, "Einstein has actually done for physics what Mr. Keynes believes himself to have done for economics," and Keynes was not a man to let someone get away with that. When he wanted to, he could wield an acid pen, and he now set to work systematically to demolish his critics, singly and en masse; sometimes with sarcasm, occasionally with brilliance, and not infrequently with petulance: "Mr. X refuses to understand me," seemed to rise like a sigh of despair from many of his brief communications.

But the war was approaching; Munich was followed by worse. Keynes watched in indignation the pusillanimous letters of some leftwingers to the New Statesman and Nation, on whose board he managed to find time to serve. He wrote to its columns: "Surely it is impossible to believe that there can really be such a person as 'a Socialist'! I disbelieve in his existence," and then, "When it comes to a showdown, scarce 4 weeks have passed before they remember that they are pacifists and write defeatist letters to your columns, leaving the defense of freedom and civilization to Colonel Blimp and the old school tie, for whom three cheers."

When the war came Keynes was too ill to be a permanent member of the Government. They gave him a room in the Treasury and picked his brains. He had already written another book, "How To Pay for the War," a daring plan that urged deferred savings as the principal means of financing the war. The plan was simple-a portion of every wage earner's pay would automatically be invested in Government

bonds which would not be available for redemption until after the war. Then, just when consumer buying would again be needed, the savings certificates could be cashed.

Compulsory saving-what a change from his earlier efforts to achieve a kind of compulsory investment. But the change was in the times and not in Keynes' thinking. The old problem had been too little investment and its symptom had been unemployment. The new problem was too much investment-an all-out armament effort—and its symptom was inflation. But the framework of "The General Theory" was as useful in understanding inflation as it had been in understanding inflation's opposite-unemployment. Only it was upside down. Now more and more incomes were being handed out with each turn of the wheel, instead of less and less. Now savings were far short of what was needed to balance out the flow of income, instead of being embarrassingly large.

Accordingly, the cure was the opposite of the depression tonic. Then Keynes had urged that investment be bolstered by every possible means; now he urged that savings must be increased.

The point is important because many have mistakenly judged Keynes as an economist who favored inflation. He did favor "reflation" (a pumping up of incomes and not prices) from the depths of the depression. But to think that he favored inflation for inflation's sake was to disregard such a passage as this from "The Economic Consequences of the Peace":

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily * * *. Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

The

But despite its logic and its appeal-Keynes made much of the fact that his deferred savings plan would serve to widen the distribution of wealth by making everyone an owner of Government bonds-the plan failed to arouse much support. It was too new; the old methods of taxation and rationing and voluntary savings drives were tried and trusty weapons of war finance. A deferred credit scheme was tacked on as an ornamental flourish but it was never given the central place Keynes had envisaged for it.

But he had no time to lament its cool reception; he was now fully embroiled in the British war effort. In 1941 he flew via Lisbon to the United States. It was to be the first of six such trips; Lydia went with him as his nurse and guardian. Ever since his first heart attack she had assumed the role of timekeeper for her indefatigable husband and many a dignitary had been politely but firmly ushered out at the expiration of his allotted stay. "Time, gentlemen," said Lydia, and business stopped.

His trips to the United States involved the precarious problems of Britain's war finance and the overhanging question of what was to happen in the terrible postwar interim. Britain was not the only one concerned; the United States, as well, wanted to lay the foundation for a flow of international trade which would avoid the desperate financial warfare which had already led to physical warfare. An In

ternational Bank and an International Monetary Fund were to be established which would act as guardians of the international flow of money; in place of the old dog-eat-dog world where each nation sought to undercut everyone else, there would be a new cooperative effort to help out a nation which found itself in monetary difficulties.

The final conference was held at Bretton Woods. Keynes, despite his illness and fatigue, clearly dominated the conference; not when it came to winning all his points, for the final plan was far closer to the American proposals than to the British, but by virtue of his personality. One of the delegates gives us an insight into the man in this entry in his journal:

This evening, I participated in a particularly recherché celebration. Today is the 500th anniversary of the concordat between King's College, Cambridge, and New College, Oxford, and to commemorate the occasion, Keynes gave a small banquet in his room *** Keynes, who had been looking forward to the event for weeks as excitedly as a schoolboy, was at his most charming. He delivered an exquisite allocution. ** * It was an interesting example of the curiously complex nature of this extraordinary man. So radical in outlook in matters purely intellectual, in matters of culture, he is a true Burkean conservative. It was all very pianissimo, as befitting the occasion, but his emotion when he spoke of our debt to the past was truly moving.

When Keynes made his final speech at the conclusion of the conference "If we can continue in a larger task, as we have begun in this limited task, there is hope for the world"-the delegates rose and cheered him.

As always, his major efforts did not preclude a few minor ones. He was made a director of the Bank of England ("which will make an honest woman of the other is anyone's guess," he had declared) and chairman of a new committee on the music and arts which had been established, like the English universities, under the aegis of the Government. Thus, while he was carrying the weight of presenting Britain's point of view to an international economic council, he was also keeping up a stream of correspondence on music travelers, the Vic Wells Ballet, poetry reading, and library exhibits. And of course he kept on collecting; he scooped the Folger Library on a rare volume of Spenser and explained a little guiltily to the librarian that he had used the Foreign Office bag to have the catalog sent over to him.

And the honors started to pour in. He was elevated to the peerage: he was now Lord Keynes, Baron of Tilton, an estate which he had bought in middle life only to discover to his delight that one of the branches of the Keynes line had once owned these lands. There were honorary degrees to be accepted at Edinburgh, at the Sorbonne, and from his own university. There was an appointment to the board of trustees of the national gallery. And still there was work: the first loan to Britain had to be negotiated and Keynes, of course, was given the task of presenting Britain's viewpoint. When he returned from that trip and a reporter asked him if it were true that England was now to be the 49th State, Keynes' reply was succinct: "No such luck.” In 1946 the ordeal was over. He went back to Sussex to read and relax and prepare for a resumption of teaching at Cambridge. One morning there was a fit of coughing; Lydia flew to his side; he was dead.

The services were held in Westminster Abbey. His father, John Neville Keynes, aged 93, and his mother, Florence, walked up the

aisle. For all their sorrow, few parents could have wished for more in a son. The country mourned the loss of a great leader, gone just at a time when his acumen and wisdom were most needed; as the Times said in a lengthy obituary on April 22, “By his death the country has lost a great Englishman.

He was not an angel by any means. This most sparkling of the great economists was only a human being, albeit a remarkable one, with all the faults and foibles of any person. He could win 22 pounds from two countesses and a duke at bridge and crow delightedly; he could also undertip a bootblack in Algiers and refuse to rectify his error saying, of all things, "I will not be a party to debasing the currency." He could be extraordinarily kind to a slow-thinking student (economists, he said, should be humble, like dentists) and obnoxiously cutting to a businessman or high official to whom he happened to take an intuitive dislike. Sir Harry Goshen, the chairman of the National Provincial Bank, once rubbed Keynes wrong by urging that "we let matters take their natural course." Keynes replied "Is it more appropriate to smile or rage at these artless sentiments? Best of all, perhaps, to let Sir Harry take his natural course."

Keynes himself gave the clue to his own genius-although he was not at the time writing about himself. Discussing his old teacher Alfred Marshall (whom he both loved and rather lovingly derided as "an absurd old man"), Keynes spelled out the qualifications for an economist:

The study of economics does not seem to require any specialized gifts of an unusually high order. Is it not, intellectually regarded, a very easy subject compared with the higher branches of philosophy or pure science? An easy subject, at which very few excel. The paradox finds its explanation, perhaps, in that the master economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher-in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man's nature or his institutions must lie entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood; as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near the earth as a politician.

Marshall-as Keynes says only approximated that ideal, for Victorian that he was, his economics lacked the necessary iconoclasm to give it deep social penetration. Keynes came closer: the Bloomsbury attitude of "nothing sacred" spilled over into the sacred precincts of economic orthodoxy; once again the world was put into focus by a man not so blind as to fail to see its sickness, and not so emotionally and intellectually dispossessed as to wish not to cure it. If he was an economic sophisticate, he was politically devout, and it is in this curious combination of an engineering mind and a hopeful heart that his greatness lies.

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