PRE-WAR STANDARD
CAN THE WORLD RETURN?
GROWING DOUBTS EXPLAINED.
"Is the nineteenth century over?" was the title-of an. address given by Mr. J. M. Keynes to the members of the Manchester Luncheon Club on 30th October (reports the "Manchester Guardian").
Mr. Keynes said there were two fundamental presumptions or pre-occupa-tions in the minds of many men to-day. One was that the war was essentially an interruption of conditions existing in 1914, and that, sooner or later, we should return to those conditions, and the material progress of the nineteenth century would be resumed. Another was that the chief obstacle to this satisfactory outsome' was something, vaguely called "Bolshevism," or "Labour," or some such term; and that if quiet men like Mr. Bonar Law, or ingenious men like Mr. Lloyd George, could find some way of avoiding the danger they did not much, mind how they did the trick. He wanted, however, in attempting a birdVeye view over the landscape, to try to indicate certain other .possibilities ; amongst the deep, underlying currents. The state, of affairs existing <n 1914 were very abnormal and peculiar. He was inclined to believ© that from the time of Solon to the time of Charles 11. there wae not any very material changes in the, conditions of life in the lowest ranks of the populace. But towards the end of the seventeenth century some sort of spring was released and the modern world began. The accelerating growth of wealth and population began, and, in ite essential features, the modern world. An accelerating society—by which he mea-nt one which depended on the scale of operations always 'getting faster and larg«r— was not quite the same thing, of course, as a society progressing' in quality. Clearly an accelerating state of affairs could not go on permanently. And if that were true of the world as a whole, it must be true, and-at an earlier date, of a continent of limited resources like Europe. A point would come when tho standard of life would cease to improve, when the accelerating society reached its maximum point, and when the tendency of the standard would be to decline. The population and all it stood for became a problem long before starvation set in. There were still wide areas of the earth which could produce food, and there were all kinds of possible improvements. Bat the question was, could they be obtained by the same expenditure of effort. As soon as a little more effort was required it meant that we had passed the maximum point, and that our standard was on the down grade. THE WAR AS A SYMPTOM; It seemed possible that the maximum point of the accelerating society was being reached or approached about t|he end of the nineteenth century, and we might 1 now be just beginning to get on to the declining part of the course. Wo certainly could Jiot reply upon reaching a higher level than we were on before. If he were right the movement was cviI dently independent of the war, though the war might have been in part a symptom of the maximum, point JkaVing been passed. The struggles which underlay the originß of the war might have been brought to a head by the fact that the general improvement was no longer as easily secured as 1 before. If we were getting nearer the point of decline the war might have'served to precipitate matters and make the decline rather earlier in date. In .par-^ ticular it had destroyed organisation—
a thing on which the modern world depended, perhaps, even more than on accumulated wealth. Also, over wide areas the war and its after-effects had destroyed the favourable conditions for saving which existed in the nineteenth century. In Germany the whole of a man's pre-war savings had practically disappeared, and although things had not gone so far in this country as ; n many others, the special psychological conditions which allowed the country to save' so much of its total income no longer existed. '
There were other things which gave reasonable grounds for a}arm. The Treaty of Peace, which he was a little surprised to hear Mr. Lloyd George describing as "a great human document which will in ?ts operation yield rich benefits not merely to Europe but to the human race throughout the .world"— that so-called human document was putting a large part of Europe back two centuries. Partly as ( "a result df 'the Peace Treaty and partly as a result of deeper causes, a large part of Europe was finding its way back with extraordinary rapidity to moire primitive conditions/ One of the most important things, which had happened since the war was thfe agrarian levoluiion, 'which in- many European countries had dispossessed large landowners and replaced them by peasants who would farm their own land, in their own primitive way, probably producing far less for export than undsr th© old conditions. The immense pre-war peasant indebtedness had been obliterated not only in Russia, but in Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and other countries. So drastic had the agrarian revolution been, in fact, that he thought future historians would' regard it as one of the most striking events of the two or three years immediately following the peace., That reor-' ganisation -. of society in Europe would. in a way make Europe stable, but stable at an inknensely lower .standard of life and civilisation. AMERICA STILL "ACCELERATING." On the other hand we had America with the. accelerating society still in full "swing, with absolutely no sign of any diminution in. its speed and strength. We in this country were wavering between the two influences. We did not quite know whether we were going to be under European or under J American and overseas influences. Partly for that reason he fancied that our destinies might be a little more in our own hands, than •in the case of - some other countries. There were - -many alarming features in the growth of our population, and so forth, m relation to our, resources. Most people would be satisfied if they saw the volume of our trade back to what it was in 1913. But in order to, absorb the whole of our working population we must be working on a materially larger scale. He believed that at present the number of men in employment was as large as in 1913, or'at any rate 1911, and that the whole of the unemployed represented the additional working population due to the increase of .population since 1911. We should have half a million more young men coming to working age each year in the near-future. Whether the accelerating society was doomed or not already, it seemed go probable that it would come to an end within the life of the youngest in that room that it must be one of their underlying preoccupations; and the great aim of wisdom and policy in the next ten to twenty y«ars -would be to stabilise our standard of civilisation at as high a' level as possible. '- -.■--.■
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Bibliographic details
Evening Post, Volume CIV, Issue 143, 14 December 1922, Page 12
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1,172PRE-WAR STANDARD Evening Post, Volume CIV, Issue 143, 14 December 1922, Page 12
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