I knew Keynes during the War, when he was attached to the British
Treasury and chief of the department charged to look after the foreign
exchanges and the financial relations between Great Britain and her
allies. A serious writer, a teacher of economics of considerable
value, he brought to his difficult task a scrupulousness and an
exactness that bordered on mistrust. Being at that time Chancellor of
the Exchequer in Italy, in the bitterest and most decisive period of
the War, I had frequent contact with Mr. Keynes, and I always admired
his exactness and his precision. I could not always find it in myself
to praise his friendly spirit. But he had an almost mystic force of
severity, and those enormous squanderings of wealth, that facile
assumption of liabilities that characterized this period of the War,
must have doubtless produced in him a sense of infinite disgust. This
state of mind often made him very exigent, and sometimes unjustifiably
suspicious. His word had a decisive effect on the actions of the
English Treasury.
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