Mr. Keynes' Solution

John Maynard Keynes, celebrated economist and author of The Economic Consequences of the Peace, wrote a letter to The Times, London. He proposed to tear up all the correspondence between Britain and France and start again as follows:

If France would agree

1) To evacuate the Ruhr;

2) To fix the nominal German liability at fifty milliard gold marks (50,000,000,000).

3) To allow the rate at which this liability is discharged to be determined by a Committee of the Reparation Commission on which would sit an American representative with a vote along with British, French, Italian, and Belgian representatives.

Then Great Britain would agree

1) To cancel all inter-Allied debts;

2) To allow the claims of the other Allies an absolute priority over her own on future receipts from Germany.

Failing acceptance of this by France, Great Britain would proceed

1) To withdraw her troops from the Rhinelands and to leave France alone, with no aid or sympathy from Great Britain, to work out her present policy to its bitter conclusion;

2) To preserve in their entirety British rights to a share of the sums collected from Germany;

3) To require the payment of France's debts to Great Britain up to 100% of France's receipts from Germany from time to time.

John Maynard Keynes, C.B., M.A., was born in Cambridge, June 5, 1883, and it is with Cambridge that Mr. Keynes' career has been intimately linked during much of his 40 years. He was educated at Eton and at King's College, Cambridge. In 1905 he became Twelfth Wrangler, Bachelor of Arts and President of the Cambridge Union Society, the exact counterpart of the Oxford debating society.

After graduating, Mr. Keynes entered the Civil Service. From 1906-08 he was in the India office. In 1912 he became editor of The Economic Journal, a London paper. From this time on his influence in the economic world expanded rapidly, so much so that in 1913 the Government designated him as a member of the Royal Commission of Indian Finance. During most of the War he was attached to the Treasury and rose to be the Acting Principal Clerk. At the Versailles Peace Conference, 1919, he was the principal representative of the Treasury and the deputy for the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the Supreme Economic Council. He is now Fellow and Bursar of King's, his old college.

Mr. Keynes in his numerous writings has never ceased to impress upon the world at large the necessity of determining Germany's ability to pay reparations before fixing the total of the German burden, which in its original form he unequivocally denounced. In France his contentions have made him particularly unpopular, and both there and in Britain he has had to face charges of pro-Germanism. Mr. Keynes is not a pro-German; he merely has the unfortunate habit, common to all economists, of looking at problems in the uncompromising light of unemotional figures.