Because the main core of this chapter is JJ's academic output, linked to College and national politics, I am including the titles and publication outlets in the narrative, the outlets often being tactical decisions in the context. This is despite the publishing convention that references should be relegated to footnotes.

Introduction

In 1934 JJ published a polemical economics book(1) aimed at a lay readership, critical of the pure protectionist approach to economic development, and advocating that priority attention be paid to farm incomes, as a generator of demand for local industry.

JJ served in the Senate(2) on several occasions, being first elected in 1938. On this platform he stoutly defended the Protestant contribution to the Irish nation-building process, though at the time he appeared mostly to be a lone voice. He did however team up with Senator James Douglas on occasion.

The 30s decade can perhaps be regarded as JJ at his best. In the 20s he had neglected his academic output, depending on his Fellowship for TCD status, and concentrated on outreach. When he failed to get a projected Chair in Political Economy, being leapfrogged by Duncan, he redoubled his academic publication efforts, and there emerged during the 30s a stream of well-researched papers, some of them of key significance.

He continued his political contacts with Cumann na nGael, and opened up contacts with Fianna Fail, while developing a devastating criticism of their 30s policies, which he was able to deliver in person to de Valera, both via the Seanad after 1938, and on at least one public occasion where they shared a platform.

In the background to this chapter the college-political(3), national-political(4), outreach(5) and academic publication(6) streams are closely interwoven, each one feeding the other on key occasions. The 'academic publications' in this decade provides a primary framework, with the other streams being folded in appropriately.

There were various family(7) episodes, involving moving house; education was a problem for a dispersed religious minority, and the need to take care of that of the present writer prompted JJ to give up his farm near Drogheda. The 'economic war' was also a factor.

College Politics

In 1934 it was noted in the Board minutes (13/01/34) that the School of Commerce Committee included the Provost (EJ Gwynn), John Good, JCM Eason, Dr Bailey, the teaching staff and the Registrar. During the period Eason, the Dublin businessman, had been active with JJ on the Council of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society. We can perhaps identify this as an indication of JJ's influence on School policy; the real world was important.

Moving House and Farming; Early RJ Memories

The Dundalk period gave JJ access to the neighbouring Barrow farm at Milestown, near Castlebellingham, and he analysed the economics of this successful labour-employing commercial farm in depth, using the results in published papers.

The decision to move nearer to Dublin, while still keeping in touch with hands-on farming, I suspect was made in 1931, before the Fianna Fail electoral victory in 1932. A move like that made in 1932 would have involved JJ ignoring strong warning signals. The farm near Drogheda was called Newtown Platin; there was a long low farmhouse, and a walled garden. There were monkey-puzzles in the front garden, conveniently placed for JJ to swing his hammock. (The lore was that when he moved house the existence of trees close enough to swing a hammock was a necessary condition!).

There was a farm-yard and stables behind, and a farm worker whose name was Brown lived there, with a young family; their names were Georgie and Vonnie, and I played with them. There was also an elder brother who had a job on the buses. JJ ran the farm by telling Brown what to do, and keeping the books. This was the beginning of the economic war, and of course the upshot of JJ's farming was disastrous, though it gave him practical insights for his writings.

My sister entered College in 1933, after finishing in Dundalk Grammar School as a boarder, and did medicine. She began doing Natural Science, at JJ's suggestion, and switched to the medical school subsequently.

We had a gramophone at Platin, and I recollect at this time a Maurice Chevalier record, 'up on top of the rainbow, sweeping the clouds away'. My sister had been in France in the 20s during JJ's Rockefeller episode, when they stayed at the Albert Kahn Foundation.

I remember at Platin being lifted up one day, to look over the wall, to see the Blueshirts marching. Also I remember being driven into Drogheda in JJ's Model A Ford and JJ giving a lift into town to old Brown the grandfather of the family who lived in the stables. There was a further occasion when children living in cottages nearby threw mud at JJ's windscreen.

I remember JJ pointing out the electric transmission lines which crossed the field nearby, and relating them to the 'Shannon Scheme', of which he was aware and regarded as a good thing.

There was a visit by my uncles James and John to Platin; I suspect this involved a family conference on Geddes(8), whose role in Argentina seemed to have been open to question.

Academic Publications: the Global Crisis

The 'academic publications' theme(9) can be related to JJ's view of the developing Irish political economy, so that interspersing the political and outreach episodes makes sense.

In or about 1930-31 JJ must have begun to realise that if he was to get academic recognition and perhaps even a Chair, he would need to publish appropriately. His first step in this direction leaned on his classical background: he published A Chronological Note on the Expedition of Leotychidas to Thessaly in Hermathena the College-based learned journal (Vol XLVI p106, 1931). This is not among JJ's papers; it is accessible on the record, but is however not germane to JJ's mainstream thinking. It was his swan-song as a classicist in the pure sense.

At about the same time his 'winter milk' paper was published: A Plea for Winter Dairying in the Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland Vol XV, no 33, 1930-31. This paper was read on March 19 1931, and JJ was introduced as 'Barrington Lecturer in Economics'. In this seminal paper, which remains relevant to this day, JJ questioned the traditional view that winter dairying was not practical economics for the Irish farmer. It was said that the winter feed required would cost more than the price of the milk would justify. The question of winter production had come on to the agenda as a result of the imposition of a tariff on imported butter, due to the winter market being flooded with imports from the southern hemisphere. This, being a peer-reviewed paper in applied economics, should have counted towards his academic recognition.

In An International Managed Currency in the Fifth Century, Hermathena XLVII p132, 1932, JJ managed to build on his classical erudition and make an insightful contribution to his standing as an economist. The paper deals with Croesus and refers to the 5th century BC. It is a highly technical analysis of the use of currencies in trading in the eastern Mediterranean, between Greeks, Persians and Phoenicians.

JJ must have sent a copy to Keynes, because there is among his papers a letter from Keynes to JJ dated 11 April 1933:

"...I was much interested in your article on questions of ancient currency, a subject in which I have dabbled myself more or less seriously from time to time. I have the impression that the bi-metallic system of the Persian Empire worked efficiently for a long period of years, without either metal driving the other out of circulation, in spite of moderate disparities from the Persian ratio on the adjoining Greek territories, and have often pondered how this could have been achieved. I suspect that the Temple hoards operated to preserve the official ratio, much as a Central Bank with very large reserves might do today. We know what enormous figures the Temple hoards had reached by the time of Alexander, and if the Temples always rigorously observed the official ratio, this might well have produced the necessary stabilising effect.

Yours very truly J M Keynes"

At this time the global economy was in the depths of the great depression that had followed the 1929 Wall St crash. JJ was motivated to attempt to explain this, in academic-type publications which were read by decision-makers, such as the Proceedings of the Institute of Bankers, where he read his paper The World Crisis: Its Non-Monetary Background on November 17 1932. In this paper JJ focused on the disequilibrium between agriculture and industry, and on the various types of friction in the pipeline between the producer and consumer of agricultural goods.

There were echoes here of his 1926 Rockefeller project, and his work with the Prices Commission. As an example he considered how '...the butcher, the baker, the grocer and the milkman (were) left unpaid because the next instalment was due on the wireless set..'. Price movement is the means of overcoming the various disequilibria, and in the pre-war world all prices were reasonably elastic. 'In the post-war world we meet a whole host of new price rigidities, for example the price of labour in sheltered industries, and the price of goods monopolistically produced...'.

Governments had tended to react to international trade disequilibria by imposing tariffs, rather than allowing supply to react to demand via the price mechanism. There was no longer a world price for wheat, due to European protectionism against cheaply-produced US wheat, the result being that there was a factor of 4 in the price of wheat (for example) between France and Argentina.

The drop in demand for producers goods was much greater, due to the high incidence of monopoly pricing. This deters new investment, and is the main obstacle to recovery. On the whole JJ used this Bankers platform as a means of launching his classic Free Trade onslaught on economic nationalism, later to be developed in his 1934 Nemesis book.

Dermot MacManus

MacManus had been an ex-service student in TCD in the 1919-21 period, and JJ had supported his work with the Thomas Davis Society, which was effectively a Sinn Fein front in TCD. He had gone on to a position of military leadership in the Free State Army. Subsequently in 1932 he was actively involved with the Army Comrades Association and its transition to the Blueshirts. This at the time would have been perceived by JJ as a reaction of the commercial farmers against the threat of Fianna Fail land-division, with de Valera perhaps perceived in a role analogous to that of Mugabe in Zimbabwe at the present time. JJ and MacManus would have seen eye to eye on the matter of the economics of large farms employing labour. JJ however would have seen the potential for organising the labour as co-operative worker-owners, and had looked earlier to Tom Johnson and the Labour party. MacManus was more in the Standish O'Grady elitist tradition(10), and is on record as having attempted to bring in Yeats to the leading Blueshirt group which included O'Duffy.

The contact seems not to have persisted subsequent to this meeting; it is probable that JJ and MacManus agreed to differ, and their ways parted. MacManus however contacted JJ decades later, in the 1960s, at the level of seeking support from JJ for academic publication of literary critical work.

Shortly after this 1931 MacManus episode JJ was approached by Sean Lemass, and was appointed by the Fianna Fail government to a Commission to report on the workings of the Civil Service(11). JJ was prepared to give advice as an economist to whoever would listen.

Academic Publications: TCD Political Economy

The Economic Journal, edited by JM Keynes and EAG Robinson, in its September 1934 issue (Vol XLIV no 175 p453) carried a paper by JJ on 'The Purchasing Power of Irish Free State Farmers in 1933'. This was a quantification of the catastrophic collapse of agricultural purchasing power consequent on the 'economic war' arising from de Valera's policy on the land annuities(12). There are some ironical asides, like a reference to the fact that encouraging farmers to grow import-substituting tobacco, in accordance with the self-sufficiency policy, cost the exchequer £300,000 in lost duty on imports, excise on home produce being preferential. Farmers gained £187,500. JJ ordered reprints, with a view to using a paper in a prestigious journal abroad as a means of supporting his arguments at home.

In the 1930s JJ's efforts in academic politics bore fruit, in that there was at last set up a School of Economics and Political Science, with himself and Duncan in it as potential successors to Bastable, who retired. Duncan however ended up with the Chair; only later, in 1939, did JJ get a Chair ('for present holder only') in Applied Economics.

JJ had clearly hoped to get the chair, as he felt he needed the weight of the appointment to maximise the influence of his Nemesis of Economic Nationalism book. In the event he had to threaten the Board with the Visitors in order to get some financial support for its publication out of the Madden Fund. His continuing marginalisation in TCD(13) sharpened his interest in national politics.

He did however continue to be supportive of student societies which had a political flavour, remaining as a vice-president of the Gaelic Society, and supporting the new Commerce Society, bringing in outside names like Findlater, Jameson and Eason, representative of the Protestant business interest. He was also a supporter of the History Society, which was set up to encourage the serious study of history, as distinct from the Historical Society which was primarily for debating.

The Nemesis of Economic Nationalism

I give primarily JJ's sub-heads; I give also some abstracts where he makes arguments of particular contemporary political relevance.

• Relative importance of world economy to different nations..

• The case of the USA shows that a nation may be nearly self-contained and yet collapse due to interdependence with the world economy...

  '..In particular the USA even before the Wall Street collapse failed to sustain the purchasing power of her agricultural population..'.

• Agricultural producers for subsistence and for exchange react differently to falling prices...

  '..The peasant farmer's...reaction to falling prices is to buy less manufactured goods... raw materials... he will till more for subsistence..'.

• The feasibility of economic nationalism depends on other nations not practicing it at the same time...

• Economic nationalism and monetary internationalism...

  '..A tariff war is an effort to separate (as for Siamese twins sharing a common circulation of the blood of commerce) two economically interdependent nations..'.

• The correct reaction to the depressing effect of other nations' tariffs is a monetary one...

  '...The way to expand consumption is to promote the production of capital goods. The workers engaged on the Shannon Scheme were consuming food and clothing that were available there and then, and producing something that would not add its quota to the volume of consumers goods for some years...'.

• The State must now do deliberately what the gold standard formerly did automatically...

  "There are important departments of economic activity which by common consent have been abandoned to public or non-profit-making enterprise...(namely) educational services, transport facilities, the housing of the working classes, forestry and the Shannon Scheme (ie electricity generation)..."

• Creditor nations have it in their power to promote the production of capital goods...

• States should sometimes go to war with other things than foreign enemies...

  '...providing homes for living heroes instead of coffins for dead ones..'.

• The bankruptcy of the world is more moral than economic.

  '..The nation which first turns the other cheek to the economic blows of its neighbours, and adopts ...a national economic policy whose chief recommendation is, not that it injures other nations, but that it benefits then as well as herself, will begin a new world era..'.

2: Right and Wrong Methods of promoting National Economic Self-sufficiency.

3: Lessons from Theory and Experience

• Correct relations of the economist and the politician...
• The economic value of our 'economic war'...
• Evidence that Great Britain too is the victim of economic warfare..
• Folly of economic war from Great Britain's point of view...
• The exact nature of the wound inflicted on us by the British taxes...
• The British taxes as part of a programme for developing a closer balance between British agriculture and British industry...
• Evidence that agricultural production is diminishing in the Irish Free State.
• Competition for export markets...
• Tariff policy and the solvency of foreign debtors...
• Our bounty on the export of cattle favours the export of raw material and destroys the market for home-grown cereals...
• Even economic nationalists do not dispute that universal free trade would produce the maximum of wealth for all....
• Importance of maintaining the exchange economy and resisting the relapse to subsistence agriculture...

  "..As an 'uneconomic' holder of 20 acres of County Meath land, I have lately altered my economy so as to produce a subsistence of potatoes and milk for about 20 inhabitants of the local village...paying no toll to transport or middleman agencies.....The new 30-acre farmers, whom it is proposed to plant on divided ranches, will, if they are wise in their own interests, practice a subsistence economy, and make little use of money, transport or shops. If they fail to produce a surplus for our townsfolk, will the latter take a leaf out of Lenin's book?..."

• Is it consistent to promote at one and the same time an industrial revival and a reversion to subsistence agriculture?

"The main problem of the Irish economy now is, not the creation of new industries, but the expansion of the home market for the products of our agriculture and of existing industries."

He concluded with a critique of the retail trade, making the case for the development of a consumers co-operative movement. This represented a sort of afterthought, distilled from his earlier work with the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1920s, which was reported in his 1927 'Distributive Waste' paper to the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society (14).

The RJ Education Problem

Church control of the education system, then as now, posed problems for Protestants living in rural areas. To assemble enough children to run a primary school required a substantial catchment area. The boarding school was the norm for second level, except for local concentrations in the main urban centres. This undoubtedly encouraged emigration, as teenagers would not have made local contacts. I have however encountered anecdotal evidence that where rural Protestant families made use of the Vocational Schools (which were not religious-dominated, and were under the local authorities), their children tended to stay on locally, and go into local businesses, or start things up. Secondary schools, as well as being denominational, tended to prepare people for the Civil Service or the professions; they were ill-adapted to the needs of a developing economy. The vocational education system was objectively better adapted, but was looked down on by the rural elite. JJ after 1938 got to be able to address these issues via the Seanad.

So, from Waltham Terrace in Blackrock Co Dublin I walked to Avoca School, then in Carysfort Avenue. Shortly afterwards it moved to Newtown Park Avenue, to the present site of Newpark Comprehensive School. (This prompted JJ to move to another rented house, Charleville, close by.) I have mostly fond memories of Avoca; the head was Cyril Parker, and he was very anti-war, based on 1914-18 experiences. He was hostile to the Boy Scout movement, which he considered militarist, though there was a troop associated with the school, which he tolerated grudgingly. He was married to Cerise Orpen, a daughter of Orpen the painter. The school was patronised by the Protestant intelligentsia, with business connections, who were in process of defending their inherited leading role in the 'civil society' of the emerging nation.

Irish was taught initially by one Boland, later by Cecil Hyde, who was I think a nephew of Douglas Hyde. We learned Irish quite successfully; I don't recollect any sense of imposition. We absorbed Irish history from the Carty texts, which are now disparaged, but we relished the drama of the narrative, and we cheered on the few occasions when the Irish won the battles.

Erskine B Childers I counted among my friends; we stayed in each other houses; his father, who subsequently became President, was then a TD supporting the Government. I recollect being in the Childers house one weekend some time around 1937 or 38, when we all went to the Guinness house at Chapelizod, and played with the Kinderslys, who were about the same age; we ran around the house and across the covered bridge which crosses the road between the two parts of the house.

I have often wondered what Childers, the Fianna Fail TD, was doing socialising with the Guinness family at that time. Could it have been part of the process that led to the ending of the economic war, with the 1938 trade agreement? The brewery in Park Royal had been built as the Guinness response to the 1932 Fianna Fail government; there was a 'flight of capital' process going on; Jacobs had expanded to Liverpool. The effects of doctrinaire protectionism, as predicted by JJ in his 1934 Nemesis of Economic Nationalism, were biting hard, with the shrinking home market.

Erskine B Childers and I were in the Boy Scouts, and we united politically to get them to drop God Save the King and substitute the Soldiers' Song.

JJ as Political Consultant

"...The State can do much to maintain private property if it takes the part of intervening when things are bad and retiring as much as possible when prosperity returns. but the simple transfer of a certain volume of purchasing power from one set of individuals to another in the community will not involve any net increase in purchasing power.

"Purchasing power is, to a considerable extent, bound up with the production of capital goods and when the production of capital goods slows down, purchasing power contracts. This is the trouble in the USA at present. The capital goods industries in America through decline in production have left about six million people unemployed. Roosevelt's NRA policy can only find employment for approximately two million out of a total of 12 million unemployed. The great problem in America, therefore, is to increase production and marketing of capital goods. This great difficulty, however, is not present to any great extent in Ireland. The NRA plan would stand a better chance of working here...."

The Fianna Fail land-division policy was anathema to him; he had shown definitively that 300 acres employing 10 men with a properly managed productive system was over twice as productive as 10 30-acre subsistence farms. Likewise the protectionist industrial policy was anathema; he saw it as simply reducing the effective size of the home market and increasing farm input costs. Industry should build on productive agriculture, on the Danish model(16).

Academic Publications as Critical Polemics

The de Valera 'self-sufficiency' policy was it its height, and agricultural exports were crippled by the 'economic war'. Drawing on sources as diverse as the Roman Empire, the USSR, the USA, Adam Smith, the Physiocrats and the Merchantilists, JJ diagnosed the sickness of the economy in terms of the inadequacy of agricultural incomes, and homed in on the need for enhanced agricultural productivity via 'large mixed farms where machinery is used'.

The experience of the Roman Empire and the USSR he identified as '..systematic exploitation of masses of agricultural producers in the interests of an urban bourgeoisie and proletariat, and later of a bureaucratic imperialism...producing an economic situation in which the peasants no longer found it worth while to produce on any serious scale for exchange..'.

During the lead-up to the de Valera Constitution JJ felt he needed to take public stands where he could, on the issue of the role of the Protestants in the Free State. Thus on December 21, 1935, he was reported in the Irish Times as speaking at Wesley College, covering teaching through Irish, Protestant interests in Ireland, and the Free State industrial revival. He supported learning Irish as one might learn French at school, but opposed teaching other subjects through it where English was the mother tongue. He supported stoutly the Protestant identity as part of the national mainstream: '...we do not regard ourselves as in any sense outlanders in this island, which is our native land..'. He foresaw negative outcomes of current economic policies: '...is there not some danger that the nation will be exploited by industrial monopoly, or a series of industrial monopolies, in the interests of an ascendancy class which is not entirely native Irish, Protestant or Catholic?'.

The Independent also took it up, with the header 'Protestants Get Square Deal'; they picked up JJ's reference to Partition, which '...was in the highest possible degree an injury to the Protestant interest, north and south...'.

Addressing British Public Opinion

JJ used the occasion, whatever it was, to give an English audience an overview of the current Irish political environment. He led in with a reference to his 1920s Barrington Lecture experience, during which '...in the first year or two (he) had to compete with the rival entertainments provided by bank robbers and civil warriors..'. He was '..vaguely conscious that the academic outlook was somehow divorced from the point of view of the man who was in daily contact with economic realities..'. He had '..sat on more than one Government Commission, and had numerous opportunities of hearing practical men give their views, and yet we seemed to speak a different language..'.

He recounted how in 1928 he had taken up residence in the country, and had begun to keep a few cows and hens as a hobby, '...seeking to acquire the art of expressing elementary economic truths in language which our agricultural population can understand and appreciate..'.

This suggests that his attempts in the 20s to bring Enlightenment Liberal political economy to the Irish rural masses had been in vain, and he had learned a lesson from the experience.

After 1932 he found himself '..diametrically opposed to the policies which are now the official policies of our Government..'. He was however '..glad to be able to state that (he had) enjoyed complete freedom of speech in both town and country; on two occasions Ministers (had) occupied the same platform...argued their view in opposition... thus helping.... in giving wider publicity to the policies (he) recommended.... De Valera and his colleagues have always been most friendly...'.

Arguments about 'breaking up the ranches' were supported by the production per acre being greater on small farms. Production per farm worker on large farms well managed, as integrated multi-product enterprises rather than ranches, however was substantially greater still(17). Larger total production must be taken up by exports, given that agricultural production already is twice domestic consumption. The current British tariff and quota system generated by the 'economic war' was bankrupting the productive large farmers.

In 1933 he had set himself the problem of how to 'win' the economic war, and to keep the land annuity payments in fact as well as in form (they had de facto been paid via the export bounty process). In his Nemesis of Economic Nationalism he had advocated the use of our substantial realisable foreign assets for an investment programme, employing '...our dislocated workers in tidying up our national household without any danger to currency stability..'. Imports, as a 'war' measure, could be from non-British sources, thus perhaps depressing the foreign exchange value of sterling.

The loss in capital value of Irish agricultural assets JJ estimated at £100M, and this was simply destruction, not just robbery, as it had been in the time of the landlords who confiscated tenants' improvements.

Unfortunately there was no clear message regarding what he wanted his audience, presumably of English Liberal intellectuals, to do next. This was perhaps a basic weakness in JJ's critical position. The natural target for his arguments at this time was the political Labour movement, but he was some way from identifying this, although Plunkett had tentatively done so in his 1920 speech(18).

Continuing his efforts to keep public opinion in Britain informed about the Irish situation, JJ published his Irish Agriculture, Then and Now paper with the Manchester School of Economic and Social Studies journal in October 1940, pp105-122. This paper reviewed critically the 'economic war' period and analysed the relationships between cattle, pigs, poultry, milk, grass and cereals. JJ introduced it with an outline of his experience of farming and market gardening between 1928 and 1934, when he '..abandoned the unequal struggle and devoted his spare time to poltico-economic agitation..' becoming a Senator in 1938 and then '..graduating back again into agriculture with the ownership of a 25 acre grass farm some 30 miles from Dublin..'.

It constituted a useful review of academic and practical insights into the main inputs and outputs of Irish agriculture during the 1930s, summarising much of his work during this period.

Self-Sufficiency in Wheat

Because of the importance of the Fianna Fail wheat policy in the 30s this unpublished work deserves some attention. He used the material in his Seanad speeches subsequently, when he needed to develop a critical approach to current wheat policies. In the paper he had also developed the argument that the wheat policies of the 1780s and 90s, which were currently viewed as supportive of the de Valera 'self-sufficiency' policy, were in fact long-term disastrous, and contributed to laying the basis for the Famine(19).

JJ then tried another angle on his wheat argument, using the prestige of publication by Keynes: Price Ratios in Recent Irish Agricultural Experience, Economic Journal (ed Keynes & Robinson) December 1937; Vol XLVII no 188 p680.

In this paper JJ developed a classical Adam Smith argument from the Wealth of Nations, regarding the need for a certain ratio between the price of cattle and corn to exist, if continuous improvement of arable and pastoral land is to take place. It takes 7 pounds of cereal under stall-feeding conditions to produce 1 pound of beef. The price of oats relative to cattle between 1891 and 1929 was stable, even during the war. Then came 1933 and the economic war. There was a huge jump in the ratio, to the extent that it would require 3.3 pence worth of oats to produce 2 pence worth of beef. The cattle population therefore dropped in 1936 to below the 1881 level. He produced a similar argument for poultry and pigs. He concluded that nothing could take the place of cattle as the central product of Irish agriculture, and cereal production could only thrive if cattle were profitable enough to require stall-feeding.

Berkeley as Economist

Continuing in this vein in the international literature, we have his The Monetary Theories of Berkeley published in Economic History (a supplement to the Economic Journal, edited by JM Keynes and EAG Robinson), February 1938.

In this JJ identified in Berkeley forerunners of ideas expressed in Keynes General Theory: "Berkeley anticipated Mr Keynes' view...that an increase in the quantity of money, if used for productive purposes, would increase the volume of employment."

He went on to relate some of Berkeley's queries to "...the most important of all the important facts formulated in Mr Keynes' General Theory is that capital is brought into existence not by the propensity to save, but in response to the demand from actual and potential consumption...".

He concluded: "..in his emphasis on the importance of consumption as a factor in the production of wealth, in his realisation of the vital part played by the quantity of money in the promotion of commerce and enterprise, Berkeley must be regarded as a precursor of Keynes. In his analysis of the nature of money itself, and of the function of gold in relation to it, Berkeley showed a complete emancipation from the merchantilist opinions of his time, and he takes high rank as one of the most modern and 'advanced' of monetary thinkers."

In pre-publication correspondence with Keynes JJ received the following letter dated April 5 1937:

"I much prefer the new version of your comments on Berkeley. But your note is now open to a new objection:- by relating it more closely to my views, you are in danger of bringing it within the objection that I am now having to attend to, that far too many articles sent to the Journal are on this and on analogous topics.

I have, however, in the enclosed suggested some small modifications which would do something to meet this. If you could accept these and are ready to let me publish it in Economic History, where there is much less pressure on my space, I should be glad to accept it.

I read Berkeley's Querist a few years ago, but I admit that his theories were not vividly in my mind when I was writing my General Theory.

Yours very truly, J M Keynes."

This issue of Economic History contains also a paper by J M Keynes on Adam Smith as Student and Professor, giving interesting biographical insights, like falling into a tan-pit while demonstrating division of labour.

JJ also was actively cultivating transatlantic contacts in support of his economic war polemics: he had among his papers a copy of an article in the New York Times magazine of April 3 1938 by Harold Callendar, and a covering letter from the author dated July 8; he had been in Spain when it appeared and had only then got back. The article was headed Riddle of the Two Irelands and an Empire and was an analysis, with some historical depth, of the then current Anglo-Irish scene, in which Callendar had used JJ's work on the evaluation of the economic war and its effect on agricultural production.

College Politics and the Seanad

The first elections to the Seanad after the new Constitution was enacted took place in 1938, on the basis of nominally vocational panels, though this was rapidly subverted into political channels for most panels, the electorate being dominated by local councillors. The University seats however managed to avoid this process, and JJ sought election by the TCD graduates(2).

In his election address he listed the following of his published works as being relevant to political image he wished to project:

Groundwork of Economics (The Talbot Press, Dublin), The Nemesis of Economic Nationalism (PS King & Son, Ltd, and The Talbot Press, Dublin), Articles in The Economist, The Economic Journal, The Nineteenth Century, and in the current (February, 1938) number of The Fortnightly.

This attention to detail paid off, and he was elected. His maiden speech on May 11 1938 is on record in the Seanad Reports; he commented on the Agreement with the UK (Capital Sum) Bill 1938, second stage, introduced by de Valera as Taoiseach; he gave his initial assessment of the outcome of the Economic War, and placed the arguments firmly in an all-Ireland context.

I quote the following extracts:

"...I felt that the Predominant Party in the country, and the leader of that Party, had their hearts set on that new Constitution, and that it was good citizenship for me to put no obstacle in the way of their achieving that constitutional change, hoping and believing, as I did, that when that Constitution had been enacted, that then the statesmanship that we even then hoped was latent in the character of our Prime Minister might somehow manage to emerge, and we have not been disappointed in that hope.

"After six years in the wilderness, and six years of economically riotous living, I rejoice to welcome the prodigal home, but I regret it is not possible to sacrifice any fatted calf in celebration of that event, because the animal that I had in mind to sacrifice was sacrificed in a different cause some three or four years ago...."

"...One of the problems of the future is the problem of relating the present and the past of Ulster to historical traditions, some of which bind them to us and to the Irish nation as a whole. On this question of Partition, the minority here have every reason to desire the reunion of all Ireland, if it can be obtained on the basis of consent. I think we have even more intimate and personal reasons for so desiring that than even the majority have here. After all, we are but a small minority. The bulk of our co-religionists are outside our political fellowship and it is a sad business for those of us born in Northern Ireland to realise when we visit that country the extent to which its particular conditions and local circumstances, and the absence of that fellowship and political unity -- the extent to which these have altered their outlook in life. We are still good friends, but the point is that, owing to the difference of political conditions, we have not so many interests in common as we would like to have and retain.

"The fact is that one does not feel quite so much at home in the Six Counties as one does in the Twenty-six Counties, and I am sure that most members of the minority here would like to feel at home in the Thirty-two Counties. There are obstacles to reunion, and perhaps the best contribution one can make to the removal of these obstacles is to try and explain as clearly as may be what the objective nature of those obstacles is. At the same time we should remember that things change and time also changes things which at first sight may appear unchangeable...."

In the ensuing debate, Senator James Douglas, with whom JJ subsequently regularly collaborated, wanted to help industry to get into the British market (anticipating the thinking of 2 decades later), and wanted an open declaration of attitude to the Commonwealth. He also wanted an end to tariffs on goods from the North.

Shortly afterwards JJ had the chance to interact in public with de Valera(21) on the basis of the arguments of a subsequent speech on agricultural issues. I again give some extracts:

"...The question, as I see it, before the House is how best we may perfect the machinery of co-operation between the Seanad and the Government. One idea which is supposed to he embodied in this House is vocational representation, and one idea associated with that representation is that expert minds, free from political or partisan bias, should give of their best in service by way of advice to the Government for the time being iii power. Therefore, if we can in any way develop the vocational agricultural element that exists in this House, strengthen and develop it, it may form the nucleus of a permanent consultative council to give advice to the Minister for Agriculture. Along such lines we may he able to arrive at some commonly agreed solution.....

"....Agriculture at the present time is engaged in licking its wounds after the battle, and it is, I think, in order that I should attempt to analyse the extent and the seriousness of those wounds. The evidence from official statistics and other sources of agricultural decay in the last few years are, I think, quite incontrovertible. Whether we take it from the point of view of diminution in gross output or diminution in net output, there is no doubt whatever that our agricultural industry has passed through a most serious and difficult time. We know from official sources that gross output is down by more than £20,000,000 per year from the very inadequate total it had reached some ten or 12 years ago....

"...the average remuneration of the 625,000 persons occupied in agriculture amounted to £88 per annum 12 years ago. Between 1932 and 1936, that average remuneration amounted, if my calculations are right, to not more than £60 per annum, the equivalent of an income tax -- although most of that money went to waste and did not enrich the national revenue -- of more than 25% on persons occupied in agricultural production. That is a serious economic loss to the interests concerned....

"...Another important aspect of livestock agriculture in the feeding of an adequate protein ration to animals, especially in the winter time, when grass is inadequate for their complete nourishment. Protein in the form of one other of the oil seed cakes is one of the agricultural raw materials we simply must import. Therefore, the annual import of oilseed cake raw material is an admirable index of the extent to which we are using this necessary protein ingredient in out ration...

"...In 1927 we imported 1,000,000 cwt of oilseed cake and meal, and, in 1931, we imported 1,136,000 cwts. of oil seed cake and meal. In 1936, we imported 429,000 cwts. of that most necessary raw material. The importance of that is not only with reference to the weight and quality added to the animals which are fed that ration but also with reference to the fertility of the soil, which is preserved by properly feeding the live stock which graze on that soil. I should not he the least surprised to find that, owing to the inadequate feeding of our live stock for the last few years, the fertility of the soil, so far from being enriched, has steadily deteriorated. That is evidence of a serious development in our agricultural situation requiring the attention of some body specially qualified to investigate it....

"...Grass is our greatest natural resource, and basic slag is one of the most important of grass manures. In 1927, we imported 28,000 tons of basic slag. In 1934, we imported none at all, and, in 1936, we imported 15,000 tons. I submit that that is evidence of neglect of one of our most important assets....

"...The most striking thing we see when we look into the matter in this way is that by far the most remunerative source of taxation to the British tax-collector was the tax on our cattle. In 1935 the British collected £2,500,000 on cattle which we sent out, and the amount of bounty paid on this side in respect of these cattle exports was only £297,000, so that we may truthfully say that the cattle industry was allowed to bear its full share, and more than its its share, of the brunt of that economic east wind...

"...In 1934-35 the British collected £444,000 from our dairy exports, and, in the corresponding year, we paid in bounty and subsidy something like £2,000,000, so that the dairy industry during this last six-year period was able to command a higher price for its products than it would have commanded if there had been no economic war and no bounty or subsidy. The important fact that emerges from that is that the economic war and the hand-to-mouth policy adopted from time to time in dealing with that war must have had a certain effect in distorting our agricultural economy from the form it would otherwise have occupied. Whether that distortion was intentional or not I do not know. At all events, it did distort it, and the fact of that distortion and the general tendency resulting from that distortion is one of the things which I should like some such expert body as this council to consider very carefully in the most impartial manner possible....

"...The shock of the settlement of the economic war has, therefore, in a way, been nearly as disastrous to certain sections of the agricultural industry as the original shock of the outbreak of the war was, because those people who, if they are able to maximise production -- it is our interest and the national interest that they should do so -- will have to be in a position to increase to full capacity the stock they carry on their land, now find that that stock is going to cost them far more money than it would have cost them if the economic war had continued. That is the principal reason why liberal credit facilities should be made available for such farmers as find it impossible to stock their land, because the value of cattle has increased in consequence of the settlement....".

Here JJ was making the case for something like the Agricultural Institute; this did not however get set up until the late 1950s. Until then, with his 'hobby farming', employing a man and keeping the books, trying various things, he was in effect a small-scale amateur Agricultural Institute.

Berkeley and Money

There had been, earlier, a review by JJ of two books relating to this period: Irish Life in the 17th Century by E McLysaght (Longmans, London 1938) and The Economic History of Cork City by W O'Sullivan (Longmans, 1937). In these reviews JJ identified tentatively the 1701 deflation as being the key factor underlying the poverty of the early 18th century, and related it to a similar episode under Elisabeth I. I conjecture that these reviews might have been the trigger for his 1939 paper.

Continuing in this productive vein JJ then published Berkeley and the Abortive Bank Project of 1720-21 in Hermathena LIV p110, 1939. Banking in the early 18th century was private and prone to failure, yet banknotes of all sorts circulated, and in fact constituted a currency, even though the credit on which they were based was often flimsy. "Whether current banknotes may not be deemed money? And whether they are not actually the greater part of the money of this kingdom?" (Berkeley's Querist). I quote JJ: "...one would have thought that the proposal to establish a solid and substantial corporate bank, which appeared in 1720, would have received a warm welcome... (there was) a petition from the Earl of Abercorn...to raise a fund of £500,000....The King approved...".

There was however considerable hostility aroused, from Swift and others; JJ analysed this, and identified as one factor the perception among the colonial elite that "...the Papists cannot purchase lands and are at a loss how to lay out their money. They will buy Bank stock and get control of the Bank to the weakening of the Protestant interest..". JJ's hero Berkeley alas at this time was away on his travels, and so was unable to intervene in the dispute. JJ argued that Berkeley would have held out, in accordance with his writings, that the bank should have been nationally owned rather than privately.

Returning more to polemical outreach mode, while remaining scholarly, JJ published his An Outlook on Irish Agriculture in Studies XXVIII no 111, September 1939. This continued the arguments of his 1935 paper, in the light of subsequent experience. Aggregate money income in agriculture declined from £52M in 1929 to £29M in 1933 and by 1938 had increased again only to £38M. The increase in industrial production under protection had increased the wealth of the towns but had increased the prices of industrial goods bought by declining agricultural incomes. A section of the paper is headed "Fallacy of 'Increasing Home Market' by mere Distribution of a Declining Population". The policy of division of large farms is again looked at critically, in the light of the potential for increased productivity, per man and per acre, presented by mechanisation in a well-managed large-scale mixed farming environment consisting of specialising large and small farms. Again, he got reprints for distribution.

A Synopsis of Berkeley's Monetary Philosophy, published in Hermathena Vol LV p73, 1940, appears as Chapter VII of JJ's 1970 'Querist' edition commentaries. He makes a case for the inseparability of Berkeley's social and monetary philosophies: '..whether money be not only so far useful, as it stirreth up industry, enabling men mutually to participate in the fruits of each other's labour?..'.

"For, in its essence, money is only a means of conveying and recording power to command the industry of others, and others will not give their services in exchange for it unless they have confidence that they in turn can get what they want in exchange for money". This far JJ; he then quotes Berkeley: "Whether all circulation be not be not like a circulation of credit, whatever medium (metal or paper) is employed, and whether gold be any more than credit for so much power?".

JJ stressed the identity of money and credit as seen by Berkeley, and related this to his promotion of the need for a national publicly-owned banking system. Private ownership of the banking system, as is has evolved, regards the distinction between money and credit as being of great importance. For a modern financier, a debt is liquidated when money is repaid. For Berkeley, monetary obligations are only liquidated when transformed into solid goods and services. The latter was JJ's position.

JJ concludes by remarking that '... the idealist philosopher who disbelieved in the independent reality of matter was before all else a realist in his economic thinking.'

The foregoing, to my mind, puts the economic thinking of both JJ and Berkeley firmly on what in modern terms has come to be known as the 'political Left'.

Sticking with Hermathena for his Berkeley work JJ then published Locke, Berkeley and Hume as Monetary Theorists in Vol LVI p77, 1940. I feel I should give two quotations from this paper, which appears as Chapter VIII of his 1970 'Querist' commentaries:

"Berkeley must have read Locke's monetary pamphlets, and Hume may be supposed to have read the Querist. Hume's ideas were absorbed by his bosom friend Adam Smith, and passed by this channel into the main British stream of accepted monetary doctrine. And yet, as we shall see, essential elements in Berkeley's monetary philosophy failed to penetrate the mind of Hume, and accepted monetary doctrine has been impoverished as a consequence. The theory of money that appears in Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations' stands decidedly apart from his main line of reasoning."

After some five pages or so of close argument he concludes: "...Thus Hume deliberately opposes not only the main theme of Berkeley's book (national banking), but what the event has proved to be the inevitable and necessary form of commercial and monetary development - the growth of paper credit...".

The Irish Association

The origins of the Irish Association were rooted in the perceptions of the de Valera Constitution of 1937, as seen from the angle of the Northern Protestants. It was a conscious attempt to stem the increasing divergence of outlook, and to preserve the opportunities for all-Ireland interaction presented by the status of the Free State within the Commonwealth. Names associated with its foundation were Frank McDermot and General Hugh Montgomery.

Academic Recognition

Family Events

The move the the Glen, near Drogheda, which took place in 1940, as a war expedient, I treat in the 1940s module (I have tended to include the year ending in 0 with the previous decade, but here I make an exception).

Notes and References

2. JJ's election address I have given in full in Appendix 8, along with the names of his support committee. His maiden speech on May 11 1938 is on record in Column 99 of Vol 21 of the Seanad Reports; I also reproduce this in full in the hypertext support material; it is also hot-linked from the chronological summary of his speeches which I have collected in the 1930s Seanad module of the hypertext.

3. The highlight of JJ's interaction with the TCD Board in the 1930s was when in 1934 he had to 'threaten them with the Visitors' to get a small subvention for publishing his Nemesis of Economic Nationalism.

4. The 1930s political thread was undoubtedly fed by some of his quasi-academic publications, most of which gave him ammunition for his Seanad participation from 1938. He also had media exposure, often arising from the Protestant school speech-day circuit.

5. I count as 'outreach' JJ's work with the SSISI (Statistical and Social Inquiry Society), where he served on the Council during the decade, the related Barrington Lectures, which in 1932 he managed to bring in under the SSISI umbrella again, after their post-war period of alienation, and finally the Irish Association, of which he became a founder-member in 1938. In all three networks JJ consistently promoted all-Ireland thinking.

6. The criterion I have adopted here is that of 'peer-review', but even with this constraint it is evident that a high proportion of JJ's 1930s academic output was motivated by the developing Irish 'political economy' environment. He published not only in the TCD Hermathena but also in the SSISI Proceedings, in the Jesuit quarterly Studies and in JM Keynes's Economic Journal.

7. JJ moved from Dundalk to near Drogheda in 1932, here he again farmed with rather more dedication, but less success, due to the economic war. He moved back to a rented house in Dublin in 1935, and to another in 1937, and then in 1940 he bought a farm, again near Drogheda, where we survived the Emergency in relative comfort. This trail is followed in the family thread of the hypertext.

8. JJ's orphaned nephew Geddes had aspired to a life in the open air, abroad, and JJ in the end managed to fix him up on a ranch in the Argentine, through Mahaffey in TCD; there was a Traill property there. There is extensive and rather acrimonious inter-family correspondence about Geddes around this time, on record among JJ's papers. It seems one option being promoted by JJ was to bring him back and get him into a management role in some agricultural enterprise, but he did not buy this, preferring to continue his somewhat adventurous gaucho-like role. The correspondence peaked in 1932, and then ceased, so the issue whatever it was must have got sorted out, and we lose sight of Geddes until he came back in 1940 on his way to join the RAF. He was shot down over North Africa. It would be somewhat of a red herring to develop the Geddes saga in full here, but there are indications that it may surface in another context.

9. I have overviewed JJ's academic publication stream in Appendix 5, and expanded on the details in the 1930s module of the hypertext. In this decade narrative I have selected the key papers and given their references in the text.

10. However in later life Standish O'Grady was promoting co-operative communes in Jim Larkin's Irish Worker, in 1912-13. See his To the Leaders of Our Working People, ed EA Hagan, UCD Press 2002. There are references to Dermot MacManus in Maurice Manning's The Blueshirts, Gill & Macmillan (1971, 1987), and in Mike Cronin's Blueshirts and Irish Politics, Four Courts Press (1997); this documents the Yeats episode. I have expanded on this in the 1930s political module of the background hypertext. According to Micheal O Riordain, the retired Irish Communist Party leader, (Irish Times letter, 22/01/2001) the 'ordinary Blueshirts' were not fascists, but their leadership did consciously support the German and Italian models, as evidenced by JA Costello's Dail speech on February 28 1934, which he quoted. O Riordain went on to concede that by 1948 Costello had retreated from that position.

11. On November 28 1932 Sean Lemass, then Minister for Finance in the new and dreaded Fianna Fail Government, wrote to JJ inviting him to participate in a commission of enquiry into the Civil Service. JJ accepted, and contributed to the work of the commission, though not so significantly as he had done on his earlier Agriculture and Prices commissions in the 1920s. I have also referenced this episode in the 1930s political module of the background hypertext.

12. The 1935 Yearbook of Agricultural Co-operation, an annual publication of the co-operative movement in Britain, has on p67 an article by HF Norman headed The Irish Free State in which JJ's analysis of the situation is quoted, based on this paper in the Economic Journal. I have made this available in the 1930s Plunkett module of the hypertext.

13. As an example of the flavour of the Board at this time, I feel I should mention the censure by the Board of JM Henry, a Mathematics lecturer and Junior Fellow, for his book 'The New Fundamentalism', as being inconsistent with his role as a tutor Fellow. Presumably he was considered in danger of corrupting the youth. A motion to deprive him of his pupils was narrowly defeated. According to McDowell, Henry '...took such a wide view of culture that he tried to combine all elements of it together. Mathematics, psychology, philosophy, comparative religion, education, dietetics, fringe medicine, all were grist to his mill....a credo of an eccentricity which places it in the outer fringes of the curiosities of academic literature....his genuine surprise at the indignation caused by an implication, tossed off incidentally in his book, that the Virgin Mary was a respectable Temple prostitute...'. The foregoing throws light on the nature of the incubus under which JJ laboured, as a result of his having been, like Max Henry, a pre-1919 Fellow. He had to work all that much harder to avoid being labelled as a polymath, dilettante or guru. I expand on this in the 1930s TCD college politics module in the hypertext.

14. 'Some Causes and Consequences of 'Distributive Waste' (J SSISI vol XIV, p353, 1926-27).

15. There is a draft minute of this meeting among his 1930s papers, and I have embodied this in the 1930s module of the political thread of the hypertext, which is overviewed in Appendix 10. In the minute JJ's contribution is treated anonymously, as an 'economist'. This could perhaps have been at his own request. While recognising that Fine Gael was trying to look after the interests of the labour-employing commercial farmers, JJ would probably have been uneasy about the extent to which the then Fine Gael was becoming identified with the Blueshirts, and consciously supporting the German and Italian models. (see note 10.)

16. JJ's ideal vision was commercial farming in large units, whether Milestown-type capitalist, as described to the SSISI, or Ralahine-type co-operative, as described by James Connolly in Labour in Irish History, and envisioned later by JJ in his Irish Agriculture in Transition. This implied a large farm labour workforce, potential Labour supporters. We have here perhaps a foreshadowing of the Labour-Fine Gael coalition which was later to emerge, though without the type of co-operative-oriented policies to which JJ aspired. The Fianna Fail land division into 30-acre subsistence lots was anathema, as was protectionism, which he saw as the road to croneyism, based on his brother's Indian experience. Despite this Fianna Fail valued his services and aspired to use them, as evidenced by the 1932 Lemass letter.

17. JJ had recently published a Statistical Society paper to this effect, Aspects of the Agricultural Crisis at Home and Abroad, (JSSISI XV, 79, 1934-5). He expanded on it subsequently, in his Capitalisation of Irish Agriculture (JSSISI XVI, 44, 1941-2), instancing three farmers who between them farmed 700 acres and employed 50 workers.

18. The occasion was a dinner in honour of Sir Horace Plunkett on March 4 1920, at which Plunkett commended the British Labour Party for their support of the Irish Dominion League, which was holding out for a united Ireland within the Commonwealth.

19. This paper is reproduced in full in the background hypertext. The '1790s utopia' arguments used by economic nationalists he demolished using eyewitness evidence from Arthur Young's travels. On May 30 1936 the Irish Times had a report headed 'Drawbacks of Wheat / Present Systems Dangers / Warning by an Economist'. This was JJ's Athy Barrington Lecture. The contents of the report is basically that of the unpublished 'wheat' typescript which I have reproduced. This report therefore identifies it with the Barrington Lecture stream, which was an important political outlet for JJ's ideas. I have collected some press cuttings reflecting JJ's public campaigning in the period 1935-38 and they are accessible in the 1930s political module of the hypertext.

20. I treat the emergence of the democratic reform movement, later associated with the emergence of AJ McConnell as Provost, in the latter part of the 1930s TCD college politics module of the hypertext. The process was helped by progressives like RM Gwynn joining the Board, on the decease of McCran; the flavour of Board decisions improved significantly towards the end of the decade, with support for projects such as the Irish Students Association as an all-Ireland body, inviting Robin Flower, of Blaskets fame, to give the Donnellan Lecture, and sanctioning the Dublin University Fabian Society, founded on the initiative of Owen Sheehy-Skeffington.

21. On July 10 1938 in the Sunday Times there was a report by their Dublin correspondent of the Centenary Reunion of the past graduates of the Albert Agricultural College, which was addressed by de Valera, and by JJ. This was in a sense a public celebration of the ending of the 'economic war', with de Valera admitting the need to develop agricultural exports. JJ used the occasion to go over the ground of his July 6 Seanad speech, in the presence of de Valera; this is accessible in full via the Public Services and Seanad stream of the hypertext. The speech was also reported positively in the Sunday Independent on July 10, 1938, and there had been a preview of the speech when JJ had presided at the end of term celebrations in the Royal School Cavan, as reported in the Irish Times on July 2 1938. Charles Garnier had been in Ireland during JJ's Seanad campaign, and on hearing of his success invited him to become officially a Membre Etranger of the Cercle Autour du Monde, which JJ accepted in October 1939.

22. The background to the Irish Association is given in some detail in the associated hypertext 1930s Irish Association module, and in Mary McNeill's 1976 paper, as published by the Association in 1982.

23. See Appendix 3 for an overview of the Albert Kahn Foundation; I have expanded on his contacts in this decade in the 1930s module of this thread of the hypertext; the Moody review of Garnier's book in Irish Historical Studies (Vol 2 no 5, March 1940) is included with the Garnier letters.

Some navigational notes:

Copyright Dr Roy Johnston 1999