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from Part I - Reactions to ‘The Economic Consequences of the Peace’ (1919–1924)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2012
When Keynes left the Paris Peace Conference and resigned from the Treasury in June 1919, he gave up his influential role behind the scenes and emerged into the limelight as a publicist and propagandist. For the rest of his life he was to be occupied with successive attempts to persuade the world to come round to his own way of thinking.
On his arrival in London he wrote to General Smuts about his resignation, saying according to Smuts's biographer Sarah Gertrude Millin ‘that he hoped Smuts would feel one ought to do something about what was happening in Paris-revelation, protestation’ (General Smuts, vol. 11). Smuts replied that he was sorry Keynes had ‘cut the painter. Not that you did not have every reason. But it is never advisable to act under the impulse and influence of such a strain as you had been passing through!’
In this letter quoted in the biography Smuts continued:
I think it would be very advisable for you as soon as possible to set about writing a clear connected account of what the financial and economic clauses of the treaty actually are and mean, and what their probable results will be. It should not be too long or technical, as we may want to appeal to the plain man more than to the well informed or the specialist.
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