John Maynard Keynes

Dear Mr. President,

You have made yourself the trustee for those in every country who seek to mend the evils of our condition by reasoned experiment within the framework of the existing social system. If you fail, rational change will be gravely prejudiced throughout the world, leaving orthodoxy and revolution to fight it out.

But if you succeed, new and bolder methods will be tried everywhere, and we may date the first chapter of a new economic era from your accession to office. This is a sufficient reason why I should venture to lay my reflections before you, though under the disadvantages of distance and partial knowledge.

At the moment your sympathisers in England are nervous and sometimes despondent. We wonder whether the order of urgency between measures of Recovery and measures of Reform is being observed, or whether we have not sometimes mistaken the latter for the former.

It is generally agreed that the objects of recovery are to increase the national income and to put more men to work. In the field of gold-standard countries, public works can be organized more quickly than any other form of loan expenditure, and from this point of view they are of the first importance.

With regard to these, I should lay my emphasis on the increase of purchasing power resulting from governmental loan-expenditure—whether on public works or in any other way. It is true that loan-expenditure is only a temporary measure; but it may be an indispensable temporary measure during the transitional period.

J. M. Keynes