saying: "We hold with financial experts like Mr. McKenna, Mr. Keynes, and others, that a great deal of the present unemployment, possibly the whole of it, is directly due to the policy of deflation," and arguing that "as long as there is unemployment the Government may safely and without thinking about foreign buyers, help trade by not frittering their money away, as Sheridan put it, by paying their debts." Mr. Strachey also submitted the article before it was published to Mr. McKenna, and so was able to print before it a letter from him in which Mr. McKenna endorsed Mr. Strachey's analysis of the financial position and added: "I am glad that you do not minimize the evils of inflation, but there can be no question that deflation is not less injurious. A policy either of inflation or deflation should never be adopted, as you say, except as a corrective, and the degree of unemployment at any given time will always furnish a test of the right medicine to be applied."
In spite of Mr. McKenna's emphatic reference to the evils of inflation, the words last quoted from him can be easily read to mean that it is nevertheless a cure for unemployment, to be applied freely when the evil is rampant. In fact, if they do not mean this, it is hard to see what they do mean.
