ETIENNE MANTOUX The CARTHAGINIAN PEACE or The Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes With an Introduction by R. C. K. ENSOR and a Foreword by PAUL MANTOUX GEOFFREY CUMBERLEGE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO 1946 fiTIENNE MANTOUX OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS AMEN HOUSE, 1.C.4 London Edinburgh Glasgow New York Toronto Melbourne Cape Town Bombay Calcutta Madras GEOFFREY CUMBERLEGE PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN 4745.640! INTRODUCTION HIS is not a memorial volume. Its publication had been Tundertaken on its merits some time before its author was killed; and but for the very long delays incidental to book- production in wartime, he would have had the satisfaction of seeing it in print. No one who knew E/tienne Mantoux can be other than glad that an ' inheritor of unfulfilled renown' should have left behind at least this one book for remembrance. But its value is in itself, in the written word, and does not depend upon anything that we, his friends, may recall of a wonderful promise cut short on the threshold of performance. Thismuch, however, should be premissed on the personal side. In undertaking his ruthless dissection of the book published twenty-six years ago by the then Mr. J. M. Keynes, Mantoux was not actuated by any undiscriminating prejudice against Lord Keynes's subsequent work. On the contrary, he fully shared the interest which most living economists have taken in it. A long critique of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1937 in the Revue d' Economic Politique, survives to show his attitude towards the maturer speculations of the great Cambridge teacher. The target of his attack, then, is not Keynsianism in general, but simply The Economic Consequences of the Peace—the rather youthful, over-clever, but prodigiously successful book, which from 1919 down to the present day has done more than any other writing to discredit the Treaty of Versailles. It is a book whose main dogmas have too long ceased to be argued about. They are taken for granted; they have passed into a legend. As such, they constitute, at least in the English-speaking countries, an influence to which no would-be framer of peace treaties can afford to be indifferent. And yet it has become the influence^ not of living thought, but of a dead hand. It was high time that somebody brought its dogmas once more to the test of facts and recorded realities. fitienne Mantoux's attempt to do this was not belated; for in truth, along its present lines, it hardly could have been made earlier than it was. Its strong feature is its confrontation of Keynes's dogmas with subsequent, including quite recent, events. So late as 1939 some of these events had not happened, Vi INTRODUCTION and others had happened behind screens which did much to conceal their proportions. Keynes had denounced the 1919 Treaty with Germany as over-harsh to the vanquished and impossible of execution. The sums demanded for reparations, he argued, were far in excess of what Germany could afford to set aside year by year; and even if by inhuman pressure on her people's standard of life she went some way towards doing so, it would be impracticable for her to transfer such large sums to the Allied countries across the obstacle of currency frontiers. Etienne Mantoux replies that under Hitler's pre-war rearma• ment policy Germany proved able year by year to set aside for war preparation sums actually greater than those which The Economic Consequences of the Peace had declared impossible; and was moreover able to do so, while maintaining the health and physical efficiency of her people at a notably high level. Again, in and from 1940, when the reparations boot was on the other leg, and Germany after conquering Western Europe was determined to wring huge ransoms from her prostrate oppo• nents, she did not find the problem of currency frontiers at all insoluble. Where there was a will, there was a way; and once more the Keynsian difficulties went up in smoke. But it is not merely with such central hammer-blows that £tienne Mantoux attacks the legendary idol. He goes all over it limb by limb, challenging the whole range of his adversary's conclusions, political as well as economic. Though The Economic Consequences of the Peace professes economics in its very title, it was in fact largely a politician's tractate; and it contributed most powerfully in the political sphere to some consequences— e.g. the defeat of President Wilson and the secession of the United States from the peace treaties and the League of Nations —which probably its author did not desire. It presumably has not gone for nothing on this side that Etienne Mantoux could consult, in his own father, a person whose inside confidential knowledge of the negotiations and negotiators of 1919 happens to be unsurpassed. But of course he observed the rules of the game, and his book relies on none but publicly verifiable evidence. On the economic side he had the advantage of work• ing in America, while America was still neutral and economic information about the belligerents was not entirely confined within war's straitjacket. His economic data are well mar• shalled and very informative. The book's value lies in prospect no less than in retrospect. INTRODUCTION vii It makes popularly accessible a mass of facts, figures, and considerations which are topically relevant for our coming peace problems. Most of them, so far as I know, have never before been so conveniently exhibited together. E. C. K. ENSOR Oxford October ig45 X FOREWORD find one so young as interested as he was in world affairs—of which, as a matter of fact, he had heard something at home. There it was that suddenly, at the age of seventeen, he became aware of the difficulties and dangers of the times we lived in, having first been brought up in the atmosphere of hope which had surrounded the beginnings of the League of Nations. My lifelong friend, Mackenzie King, whose guests we were at Laurier House, was so pleased with the young fellow's budding personality that he asked him half-jokingly why he should not come again later and work under him. A couple of years later he entered a competition on the following subject, proposed by the New History Society: 'How can University students help in the creation of the United States of the World?' His answer showed how well he realized the remoteness of the goal, if at all attainable, and the resolute, patient effort needed to build up a future world-opinion. In the 'thirties he visited Germany and Soviet Russia: he knew German fairly well, and had started learning the Russian language. He was prone to observe as much as to read, fully realizing the limitations of book-learning and the value of human contact and experience. He had shown an early interest in political as well as in economic problems, but he was not party-minded. Had not the word 'liberal' lost much of its original significance, owing to its association with a party whose great days are over, it should be said of him that he was essentially a Liberal, in the full sense of the word. He loved freedom, but freedom for all, not for the benefit of a privileged few. Privilege he hated as much as arbitrary rule or State omnipotence. It was in that spirit that shortly before the war he was a party to conversations which took place between Walter Lippmann, who had just published his Good Society, and a small number of French scholars and writers, the question being how to shape a programme for a new, enlarged liberalism. He was both a son of the French Revolu• tion and an adept of English political wisdom. Although he always remained faithful to the Declaration of the Rights of Man, he was a great reader and admirer of Edmund Burke, whose writings and speeches he often remembered and quoted. As the war was drawing nearer, he was among those who did not believe that the danger could be averted unless fully realized without any of the delusions encouraged by pacifism and by the so-called appeasement policy. He was also convinced that peace could never be saved or defence made possible, should war be- FOREWORD xi come inevitable, in the absence of a close understanding between, and mutual support of, Britain and France. This conviction it was that prompted him, from 1937 onwards, to send a number of letters to the Manchester Guardian, which were repeatedly followed by answers and discussions. Some of his present readers may remember those letters, signed either JXtienne Mantoux or Historicus, and, in the first few months of the war, Ex-Civilian. If so, they will not have forgotten their devastating, undeniably French logic, combined with some• thing much akin to British common sense and humour. Perhaps the most interesting among them are those £tienne exchanged with Sir Norman Angell, when he was endeavouring to demon• strate that the axiom ' War cannot pay' might lead to the greatest—and most dangerous—of illusions, if interpreted as ruling out the possibility of new war methods: those clearly outlined in National-Socialist written and spoken doctrine, and involving expropriation, enslavement, forced transfer of popula• tions, and, if need be, wholesale extermination. How could such perils be averted if their existence was denied? He also believed that the development of world relations after 1919 would certainly have led to more satisfactory results had a constant effort been made on both sides of the Channel to prevent fatal oppositions of views and policies.