Part 8

I incurred great odium a little while ago by saying that Mr. J. M. Keynes could claim to have achieved success while at the same time I excluded those popular heroes, Napoleon I and Mr. Lloyd George, from the list of true successes. But here is a fresh book from Mr. Keynes, simple, outspoken, well written, and making a definite step forward in our understanding of the world’s problems. You might read all the speeches and orations of Napoleon or Mr. Lloyd George through and you will know no more about men and things than when you began; Mr. Keynes will leave you different--enlightened. Mr. Keynes thinks with scientific lucidity and says what he thinks exactly and skilfully. What he says stands and will necessarily affect the history of money in a real and permanent way. Did Napoleon ever say anything or has Mr. Lloyd George ever said anything except what seemed likely to impress or humbug people in general?

It is a peculiarity of the mind of Mr. Keynes that it is at once penetrating and limited. He seems to think that the British Empire is a permanent instead of a manifestly transitory arrangement and that the United States of America and the Empire and the various States of the European patchwork are always going to retain their sovereign independence in financial and economic affairs. He assumes this much, and never questions it. But within the limits of this assumption, he writes with a lucidity and a frankness that are a liberal education for the reader.

To write of currency is generally recognised as an objectionable, and indeed almost as an indecent, practice. Editors will implore a writer almost tearfully not to write about money. This is not because it is an uninteresting subject, but because it is, and always has been, a profoundly disturbing subject. The whole modern world has been brought up on cash and on credit reckoned in terms of money. Four or five generations of us have lived by the faith that a dollar was a dollar and a pound a pound, and that if you left them about they grew at so much per cent. per annum, and also increased in value. Most things became cheaper and cheaper throughout our young lives. That cheapening seemed in the nature of things. We worked for money; we saved the stuff, we looked forward to a comfortable old age. Now we live in a phase of fluctuating and on the whole mounting prices. Whosoever saveth his money shall lose it. Even the dollar buys two things where ten years ago it bought three. The pound sterling is in a worse case, and many of the other currencies have sunken to levels beyond the wildest fantasies of 1913.

Now this, as Mr. Keynes points out, is a breach of the understanding between society and the common individual. In this system in which we and our predecessors have lived for a century and more, the system which Socialists will call the “Capitalist” system but which Mr. Keynes much more properly calls the “Private Capitalist” system, there has always been an implicit guarantee that the money we worked for and saved up and lent and invested in various ways was _good_. It was good for our needs whenever we chose to spend it again. This was the incentive to work; this was the driving force of the whole hundred years of industrial production from Waterloo to the Marne. And to a large extent the incentive has gone. Money is no longer good; it has become treacherous. Unless it can be restored this system of ours must break down and lead either to social chaos and human decadence or to a new and different system.

Now Mr. Keynes is not a Socialist. He believes that the existing system of individual competition is “in accordance with human nature and has great advantages.” But it cannot go on unless money is made trustworthy again. And his proposals to restore our confidence in money are very bold and remarkable indeed.

The vice, the almost incurable vice, of cash and credit systems, since first the methods of money became dominant in the Roman Republic, has been its tendency to expand debt to impossible dimensions. Every country at the end of the war found itself owing preposterous sums to the creditor class or to foreign countries, and forced in various measure to tax the productive classes, to tax its creditor class either directly by income-tax and capital levy, or indirectly by currency inflation, and to bilk its foreign creditors. Every sovereign State in Europe had its own policy and set about the business on its own lines, with the result that to-day Europe is a museum of methods of economic collapse, from Britain, crushed by taxation and unemployment in an attempt to deflate back to the gold standard, to Germany, smashed into complete economic paralysis by extreme currency inflation. No country remains now with its currency based on a gold standard, not even the United States of America. True, you can exchange dollar bills for gold at Washington, but then you lose by the transaction. The United States has over-bought gold and is still accumulating and hoarding gold--at a loss. If all America’s hoarded gold were minted and circulated, the value of the dollar would fall. The American dollar is the extreme case of deflation, as the exploded German mark was the extreme case of inflation.

Now what Mr. Keynes wants the world to do is to scrap gold altogether as a monetary standard and to substitute a “managed” currency. For the present he would have two independent units in the world, the dollar and the pound, because he is sceptical of the Americans and British ever working together without friction--even in so vitally important a matter. In both the United States and Britain he would have the banks and Treasury co-operating to keep in circulation such an amount of currency as would maintain internal prices at a steady level. They would decrease currency if prices fell, and increase it if they rose. He would take the price of a “standard, composite commodity”--so much steel, so much wheat, so much rice, so much rubber, and so on--and he would make that the new standard of value. He believes that the other currencies in the world would finally steady down into fairly stable relations with the “managed” dollar and the “managed” pound. And then we would go on again with our “Private Capitalism,” buying, selling, saving, investing, competing, as we did in the happy days before the war.

But there are certain curious implications in this. Mr. Keynes seems to recognise them and yet not give them their full value. The underlying assumption of Private Capitalism is that human beings will work better for gain, will show more enterprise and industry for profit, than for any other motive. But here, at the heart of the system, Mr. Keynes proposes to establish a disinterested group of managers, bankers, and officials who are not to accumulate private fortunes, though they could do so very easily by playing with the fluctuations of prices, but with a single-hearted devotion are just to maintain them for the public good. He seems to realise the difficulty here. He insists at several points that a system of Private Capitalism cannot survive without moderation; that if private enterprise will insist upon gambling upon the exchanges and working for profits regardless of any other consideration, the whole system must collapse. But if we are to rely upon the spirit of service and not upon the incentive of gain in our banks and Treasury officials, why should we not rely upon it generally? If currency can be “managed” in the public interest by men working, not for profit, but for service, why not also the production of staples and land and sea transport? But a system of economics run on the motive of service is not individualism at all; it is Socialism.

I think that in the long run Mr. Keynes will be forced to realise this. A “managed” currency is a long step towards a deliberately organised world. The gold standard was the standard of individual enterprise and go-as-you-please. The gold standard has failed and passes. Unless human society is to fail also, the age of scientific management is close at hand.

XX

THE HUB OF EUROPE: CZECHO-SLOVAKIA AND FRANCE

26.1.24

Bohemia within its mountains is like a square citadel in the very centre of Europe. Czecho-Slovakia, the old Bohemian kingdom revived and extended, is the most orderly and successful of all the States created by the Treaty of Versailles. The republic understands the modern need of advertisement; the wandering writer finds a flattering welcome there, and what is done in Prague is heard of in the world.

The new treaty with France brings Czecho-Slovakia still more prominently forward. Poor exhausted bankrupt Poland, that sucked orange, is thrust aside, and Czecho-Slovakia becomes the keystone of France’s restless incessant rearrangement of alliances. But Czecho-Slovakia is a very different country from Poland; it is sturdier and less romantically inclined, its President and chief Minister are among the most level-headed and far-seeing of European statesmen; and it is likely to prove a sobering and restraining influence upon French activities. Bohemia is the projecting westward angle of the Slav world; its language is closely akin to Russian, Serbian, Polish and Bulgarian; within its boundaries there are more than three million Germans, and three-quarters of a million of Magyars, and its natural destiny seems to be that it should act as a region of exchange and interpretation between the Slavic world, Hungary and Turkey, and the world of Central and Western Europe. German speech encloses it upon three sides. In itself, with its thirteen million odd of heterogeneous population, largely engaged in agriculture, it cannot be a country of any great importance; its importance now, as in the past, lies in its position and its possible inter-racial functions.

To these the President and his chief Minister and pupil, Mr. Benes, are acutely alive. They see in their country a meeting-place and reconciler of European interests. They are ambitious to make it a centre of trade, of intellectual interchange, and political unification. For this end they have worked steadfastly since their country emerged into renewed political existence in 1918. Theirs is a splendid and civilised dream.

It has been stated in many quarters that this new alliance has been made hastily, and at the initiative of France, as a stepping-stone to an understanding with Russia. The possibility of a Labour Government in Great Britain, and of a complete British recognition of Russia, is supposed to have driven France into a hasty search for an intermediary who would help her to end her long feud with the Bolsheviks. But in reality the recent visit of President Masaryk to Paris and London was already arranged last summer. He was already discussing the problems of this understanding then. It is probably a Czech rather than a French initiative that has brought it about.

There is something very attractive in these steadfast schemes to make Bohemia the centre of a Europe renewed. I think everyone who hopes to see a more noble and spacious civilisation emerging from the distresses of the present time must feel warmly sympathetic with these great ambitions. But it is impossible to ignore the enormous disadvantages against which the imaginations of President Masaryk and Mr. Benes and their colleagues are pitted. They make their creative effort in a tangle of long-accumulated difficulties and with some extraordinarily intractable material.

One first difficulty lies in the fact that the European railway system was developed while Prague was merely a provincial capital. The railways of Central Europe radiate from Vienna and Berlin. The centres of banking and commercial exchange were in these cities. And the efforts of Prague to deflect the currents of trade and finance to herself have hitherto fallen far short of the political ambitions of her leaders. I remember my astonishment on my first journey from Eger to Prague in 1920 to discover that I was travelling to the capital on a single line of railway.

In Prague at that time the great Sokol festival was going on, the festival of the patriotic societies, and there was little thought of Europe apparent and much of the three united peoples of Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia. National costumes made the streets gay; national music filled the air. But there was a great welcome at that time for the foreign visitor, and the bunting of all the Allies interwove with the national flag. French horizon-blue and the Stars and Stripes came into the picture with the chain and robes of the Lord Mayor of London, who was there in full regalia. And when one was in the presence of President Masaryk, with his sweeping views and his amazing knowledge of the contemporary intellectual activities of the English and French and German and Russian speaking worlds, the nationalist enthusiasm of Prague seemed no more than a picturesque and necessary background clamour.

But I was there again this last summer, and the foreign flags and visitors had gone, and I realised more fully the sturdy and obstinate patriotism of the Bohemian people. I saw Prague not on show for the foreigner, but in its everyday clothes. And the effect was extremely provincial. My impression was that the friction between the German Bohemians--an absolutely necessary element--and the Czechs had increased. That may be the fault of the recalcitrant Germans; I will not venture to adjudicate on the rights and wrongs of that issue. The point is that that bad feeling has not been allayed. There was a more pronounced objection to the German language. Hitherto the Czechs have been a bilingual people, and it was in the double possession of a Teutonic and Slav language and culture that one of our chief hopes for their future lay. But they seem to be dropping German and learning no other language in its place. They are sinking back into a churlish monolingualism. The public notices of the town of Prague are in Czech, and in Czech only. For the westerner Czech is as difficult as Russian. Indeed, so far as he is concerned, they might as well be in Chinese. This is patriotic barbarism. How can Prague expect either pleasure visitors or business men to come to her if she will not speak to them in any intelligible tongue? How can she become a mart or meeting-place of the nations if she insists that no other speech than her own shall be used in her streets? In a little while all the currents of Central European life will be flowing back again to their former centres in polyglot Vienna and Berlin.

Now these excesses of Czech patriotism make President Masaryk, to my mind, a very tragic figure. For this amazing man, this learned professor who was a village blacksmith’s son, did more than anyone to revive the self-respect and national feeling of the Czechs. He restored the Czech nation. He believed, and still believes, that he restored a necessary and decisive councillor to the European board. It may be that he has done no more than produce a tough, rustic dwarf. The fine patriotism he evoked has been vulgarised and cheapened, and about him and behind him and Mr. Benes presses a loud and irreconcilable body of ultra-patriots. His Germans have been foolish and tiresome; egged on by the Austrian landowners, who are furious because of the Capital Levy and a liberal land policy, they will do nothing but rehearse grievances. In such German places as Marienbad you see them retaliating the insults of Prague by boycotting Czech. Yet a generous understanding between Czech and German is essential to any future beyond obscurity for Bohemia. A Czecho-Slovakia, pure Czech, with perhaps for political purposes a smattering of French, will be following in the way of Poland towards a vexed and vexatious insignificance in European affairs.

XXI

THE MANDARINS AT THE GATE: THE REVIVAL OF THE OLD LEARNING

2.2.24

It would be near the truth of things to say that the only events of permanent importance in human affairs are educational events. Except in so far as they demonstrate and teach or interrupt teaching, wars and treaties, kings and laws, and all the standard material of history are but the by-products of the educator’s work. Some day, when we have escaped from the trumpery dignity of classical history, a new Gibbon will trace for us the failure in understanding and co-operation that made the Roman Empire no more than a staggering pretension and left Europe and Western Asia a festering cluster of nationalisms to this day. No conqueror can make the multitude different from what it is, no statesman can carry the world’s affairs beyond the ideas and capacity of the generation of adults with which he deals, but the teachers--I use the word in the widest sense--can do more than either conqueror or statesman; they can create a new vision and liberate latent powers in our kind. Or, if the perversity of their possibilities hold them, they can continue to put out the eyes of the children of men and let the world go on still under blind leaders of the blind.

At no time in the world’s experience has the need for a creative education been so manifest as it is to-day. This social and political system in which we live is ailing and divided against itself, failing to reconstitute even as much economic universalism as prevailed before the great war, involving itself in a hopeless muddle of debts. It is a system plainly doomed to a further series of wider and profounder disasters, unless amidst its distresses it can evolve a clearer realisation, not only in its ruling classes but generally, of the origins of our race and our civilisation, of the conditions under which our communities have grown, of the vital inter-relationships of our social order, and of the tremendous perils and the immense possibilities before mankind. A population with such a breadth of outlook, a population disciplined to creative constructive work, is not simply desirable to-day; it is imperatively demanded if civilisation is to avert a decay and a collapse as much greater than the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as a modern liner is greater than an Alexandrian galley.

It is because of his realisation of the paramount need of a great educational effort as the first and supreme thing in human affairs to-day that every intelligent man must needs note with something between dismay and bitter derision the recent signs of a revival of “classical” teaching in the schools and colleges of the Atlantic peoples. The French, who so love the eighteenth century that in foreign and domestic policy they are always trying to get back to it, have led the way. Disturbing modern subjects which tend to betray the facts that the Mediterranean Sea is not the whole world, and that most great events of present importance to mankind occurred before or outside of or in revolt against the Latin civilisation, are to be kept out of the purview of French adolescence. More Greek will be taught, but not enough of it and not well enough for the young Frenchman to realise how feeble was the political, social, and economic reaction of Greece upon Rome. He will be trained to think that there was some sort of magnificent succession between the two, whereas Rome got little from Greece except slave pedagogues and pedants, misleading literary models which crippled her own sturdier initiative, articles de luxe, living and dead, architects, sculptors and painters, and cared so little for the clarifying Aristotle that she left his books about and lost them.

The French, so largely German in race and mental quality, must however cherish their own Latin illusion in their own fashion; it comes nearer home to an English writer when he finds President Coolidge blessing the classical side. And still more dismaying is the truculent behaviour of the British Classical Association which has recently been meeting in the congenial atmosphere of Westminster School. Mr. Costley-White, the Headmaster, boasted of the increasing number of unfortunates in his school who were taking up the classical course, and made it clear that even those who were supposed to have a modern course in his school were really not given an honest modern course at all, but wasted their time with elementary classics before they were contemptuously “specialised” in science, modern history, mathematics, or modern languages. (What a classification!) And Mr. Herbert Fisher told coyly how even in a Coalition Government fragments of the Greek Anthology were not unfrequently translated into English verse during the duller Cabinet discussions--on contemporary education, one presumes. He further pointed out the power every headmaster had to direct the studies in his school, and in plain words to steal people’s sons for the classics. It is clear that the classical headmasters of Great Britain, in a mood of self-complacent obstinacy, will spare no efforts to pith as many young intelligences as possible with their antiquated, deadening and antisocial disciplines. The classical tradition is still strongly entrenched in the educational world of the English-speaking peoples, and both in America and in the British Empire it will be over its dead body only that a modern education will be able to reach the finer minds of the new generation.

Now it is a useless and dangerous civility to write flattering things about the classical education that still cripples the selected best of our youth. It robs us of a directive class of lively intelligences; it is the root cause of the pretentious sterility of contemporary statescraft. The uncritical cant it sustains about the peerless beauty of Greek art and Greek character, and the massive wisdom and integrity of Roman law and administration, has been and still is a blight upon the creative impulses of modern life. In schools and in colleges it is, and, considering the sort of man who will generally have to impart it, it must always be, a deadening grammatical grind. It consumes the scanty time of our youth, it eats up the time-table, so that any effectual broadening study of other things cannot co-exist with it. It presents the history of mankind grotesquely out of perspective; it saturates its victims with a pro-Hellenic, pro-Latin partisanship that perverts their judgment of all historical processes. Its material being languages and--in a lesser degree--literature, dead, pickled, and without any power of growth or fresh combination, it is, before anything else, a training in stereotyped expression and stereotyped forms of thought. At the present time, in the face of the world’s present needs, it is impossible to regard a school or college presided over by a classical scholar and devoted to the classical tradition as anything but a dead and death-diffusing spot in our educational system. This new offensive against the proper education of our children, to which the British Classical Association gives such definite expression, is a thing essentially evil, a thing which any servant of creative civilisation must fight at any cost. We cannot afford to sacrifice our convictions to politeness and pretend that we think the classically trained mind anything better than a warped and restricted and mischievously infectious mind.

We need a world-wide common education of which the history of life and the sciences of life and matter are the two main divisions, in which drawing, mathematics, and living languages are studied as tools and methods of expression and not as subjects in themselves, and in which music is properly utilised in the development of æsthetic perception. In such a modern education the dead languages and literature can play only a subordinate and illustrative and properly proportioned part.

XXII

LENIN: PRIVATE CAPITALISM AGAINST COMMUNISM

9.2.24