VI

ESSAYS IN PERSUASION

I wrote many of these essays painfully consciousthat a cloud of witnesses would rise up againstme and very few in my support, and that I must,therefore, be at great pains to say nothing whichI could not substantiate. I was constantly onmy guard—as I well remember, looking back—to be as moderate as my convictions and theargument would permit.

All this applies to the first three of the fivebooks into which these essays naturally groupthemselves, rather than to the last two; that isto say, to the three great controversies of thepast decade, into which I plunged myself with-out reserve,—the Treaty of Peace and the WarDebts, the Policy of Deflation, and the Returnto the Gold Standard , 1 of which the last two,and indeed in some respects all three, wereclosely interconnected. In these essays theauthor was in a hurry , desperately anxious toconvince his audience in time. But in thelast two books time’s chariots make a lessdisturbing noise. The author is looking into

1 I still stand—substantially—by the Positive Suggestions for theFuture Regulation of Money, which I wrote in 1923 before ourReturn to the Gold Standard and which are here reprinted (p. 213)as the third Essay of Book III. Whilst we were on the GoldStandard, these proposals were necessarily in abeyance. But anyone who wishes to know the general outline of how the authorwould settle our currency Problem, as it presents itself to-day,will find it in this essay.