Being an optimist, I am still hopeful that it may end in the division of Spain geographically into two states. But, above all, I want the war to come… - John Maynard Keynes

He did read the riddle of the heavens. And he believed that by the same powers of his introspective
imagination he would read the riddle of the Godhead, the riddle of past and future events divinely foreordained,
the riddle of the elements and their constitution from an original undifferentiated first matter, the
riddle of health and of immortality. All would be revealed to him if only he could persevere to the end,
uninterrupted, by himself, no one coming into the room, reading, copying, testing-all by himself, no
interruption for God's sake, no disclosure, no discordant breakings in or criticism, with fear and shrinking as
he assailed these half-ordained, half-forbidden things, creeping back into the bosom of the Godhead as into
his mother's womb. 'Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone', not as Charles Lamb 'a fellow who
believed nothing unless it was as clear as the three sides of a triangle'.

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security but [also] at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.

Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become "profiteers," who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."

Marxian Socialism must always remain a portent to the historians of Opinion—how a doctrine so illogical and so dull can have exercised so powerful and enduring an influence over the minds of men, and, through them, the events of history.