| | 1 | Author: | Keynes, John Maynard, 1883-1946 | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | The economic consequences of the peace  | | | | Published: | 2001 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a
marked characteristic of mankind. Very few of us realise with
conviction the intensely unusual, unstable, complicated,
unreliable, temporary nature of the economic organisation by
which Western Europe has lived for the last half century. We
assume some of the most peculiar and temporary of our late
advantages as natural, permanent, and to be depended on, and we
lay our plans accordingly. On this sandy and false foundation we
scheme for social improvement and dress our political platforms,
pursue our animosities and particular ambitions, and feel
ourselves with enough margin in hand to foster, not assuage,
civil conflict in the European family. Moved by insane delusion
and reckless self-regard, the German people overturned the
foundations on which we all lived and built. But the spokesmen of
the French and British peoples have run the risk of completing
the ruin which Germany began, by a peace which, if it is carried
into effect, must impair yet further, when it might have
restored, the delicate, complicated organisation, already shaken
and broken by war, through which alone the European peoples can
employ themselves and live. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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