Lady Dainton assured me that they were, though neither she nor any one she knew had actually met one. Not content with fomenting revolution on earth, they were unseating religion from on high. Communist schools were springing up to poison youthful minds with secularist literature. So far as I could make out, she accounted it for enlightenment when her own friends paraded their scepticism; but, if there had been no god, she would have invented one for the poorer classes. It was no defence that the secular propagandist might be a sincere secularist; so long as he was paid, he stood condemned.
“By the same test,” I asked, “would you call the clergy of the Established Church or the officers of the Employers’ Defence League ‘paid agitators’?”
“Certainly not! Good gracious, why . . .?” she asked in a voice that faded into the silence of stupefaction.
The pulse of the Dainton family was the last that I felt before returning to London and presenting Bertrand with my report on the first phase of reconstruction. Looking over this review later, I noticed a diminuendo in the rather robust optimism with which I began. England was still enjoying superficial plenty; and yet I heard a mutter of misgiving. Some of the factories were over-producing; finished articles, of material bought at war prices, had to be sold at post-war prices; credit became harder to obtain from the banks; and, as the first year of peace hastened to its close, other people than the Daintons woke to the unpleasant discovery that income-tax would have to be paid as though the war were still being waged and that they had for a year, in disregard of Bertrand’s battle-cries, been producing less and consuming more than they could afford.
It was a time to draw in horns. Barbara and I had ordered a new car; and in a spirit of prudence we decided to cancel the order. Sam Dainton—I hope, without his mother’s knowledge—gave me £300 for my place in the waiting-list and made another £300 within two days by selling it to one of the Jews against whom I was so indefatigably warned. After this one experience of practical finance and of an “agency-business” as conducted by Sam, I went back to the unassailable heights of theory; and for the next six months, until other cares claimed my attention, I watched the unreal boom of 1919 changing to the unreal slump of 1920.
The one was no better justified than the other. While the country clamoured for houses, the building trade clamoured for work; domestic servants were not to be procured, and the figures of unemployment rose steeply. Every other country, I read, was working overtime; and our own exports threatened to dry up.
“Ever heard of a man called Keynes, George?,” my uncle asked on my return, tossing me The Economic Consequences of the Peace.
“Yes. I sent my copy to your friend Dainton. It was the least I could do after the literature that his good lady has been pouring in on me.”
“What Keynes preaches from inside knowledge is what I’ve been preaching to you since the armistice.”
“It’s what our worthy Wright and every other economist would have preached, if he’d had the figures before him,” I answered. “But have you seen Keynes’ reception in the press? This country’s still drunk from armistice night. People won’t listen.”