the Economic Consequences of Peace

In England the outward aspect of life does not yet teach us to feel or realizein the least that an age is over. We are busy picking up the threads of ourlife where we dropped them, with this difference only, that many of us seema good deal richer than we were before. Where we spent millions beforethe war, we have now learnt that we can spend hundreds of millions andapparently not suffer for it. Evidently we did not exploit to the utmost thepossibilities of our economic life. We look, therefore, not only to a returnto the comforts of 1914, but to an immense broadening and intensificationof them. All classes alike thus build their plans, the rich to spend more andsave less, the poor to spend more and work less.But perhaps it is only in England (and America) that it is possible to be so un-conscious. In continental Europe the earth heaves and no one but is aware ofthe rumblings. There it is not just a matter of extravagance or "labor trou-bles"; but of life and death, of starvation and existence, and of the fearfulconvulsions of a dying civilization.For one who spent in Paris the greater part of the six months which suc-ceeded the Armistice an occasional visit to London was a strange experience.England still stands outside Europe. Europe's voiceless tremors do not reachher. Europe is apart and England is not of her flesh and body. But Europe issolid with herself. France, Germany, Italy, Austria and Holland, Russia andRoumania and Poland, throb together, and their structure and civilizationare essentially one. They flourished together, they have rocked together ina war, which we, in spite of our enormous contributions and sacrifices (likethough in a less degree than America), economically stood outside, and theymay fall together. In this lies the destructive significance of the Peace of Paris.If the European Civil War is to end with France and Italy abusing their mo-4 JOHN MAYNARD KEYNESmentary victorious power to destroy Germany and Austria-Hungary nowprostrate, they invite their own destruction also, being so deeply and in-extricably intertwined with their victims by hidden psychic and economicbonds. At any rate an Englishman who took part in the Conference of Parisand was during those months a member of the Supreme Economic Coun-cil of the Allied Powers, was bound to become, for him a new experience, aEuropean in his cares and outlook. There, at the nerve center of the Euro-pean system, his British preoccupations must largely fall away and he mustbe haunted by other and more dreadful specters. Paris was a nightmare, andevery one there was morbid. A sense of impending catastrophe overhung thefrivolous scene; the futility and smallness of man before the great events con-