I

THE STATE OF OPINION

3

judice based on some aesthetic or personal standard,inconsistent, in politics, with practical good.

We cannot yet tell. Even the public learns byexperience. Will the charm work still, when thestock of statesmen's credibility, accumulated beforethese times, is getting exhausted ?

In any event, private individuals are not underthe same obligation as Cabinet Ministers to sacrificeveracity to the public weal. It is a permitted self-indulgence for a private person to speak and writefreely. Perhaps it may even contribute one ingredientto the congeries of things which the wands of states-men cause to work together, so marvellously, for ourultimate good.

For these reasons I do not admit error in havingbased The Economic Consequences of the Peace on aliteral interpretation of the Treaty of Versailles , orin having examined the results of actually carryingit out. I argued that much of it was impossible ;but I do not agree with many critics, who held that,for this very reason, it was also harmless. Insideopinion accepted from the beginning many of mymain conclusions about the Treaty . 1 But it was nottherefore unimportant that outside opinion shouldaccept them also.

1 " Its merely colourable fulfilment of solemn contracts with a defeatednation, its timorous failure to reckon with economic realities," as ProfessorAllyn Young wrote in a review of my book. Yet Professor Young hasthought right, nevertheless, to make himself a partial apologist of theTreaty, and to describe it as " a forward-looking document."